D&D 5E (2024) A critical analysis of 2024's revised classes

[billd91]

What the martial vs. caster debate is really about is not combat balance, but narrative authority. Casters can use spells to simply make a thing happen, whereas martials can really only rely on skills, filtered through DM adjudication, to make things happen. At low levels, this means the martials have to play the “mother, may I?” game with the DM to solve problems that don’t involve reducing a pool of hit points to zero, while casters have access to a toolbox of ready-made solutions. See arguments about stealth and thieves’ tools vs. Invisibility and Knock. At high levels, this means casters get access to things like teleportation, telepathy, flight, and of course eventually Wish, while martials are stuck doing the same things they’ve been doing since first level but with higher numbers.

For the most part, this kind of complaint has largely been a "Yeah, so?" kind of issue. Wizards, and to an extent other high level casters, open up new ways to play or move across wide areas via plane shift, teleport, astral spells, wind walk, etc. But in my experience it's rare that they do it to tick off items on their personal agendas. These may change things in the campaign to a degree, a degree that may give the DM headaches, but the whole group generally benefits and takes part in the shenanigans that follow. And I'm not sure I've ever seen in actual play a spell caster enabling these things actively refuse to do them on behalf of one of the fellow players' agendas.
That's why so many of these kinds of things are just to me.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think that it's interesting that in the realm of monster-fighting, a high-level martial character can already do things well beyond what a highly trained normal person can do. In that area, this includes things like tanking a dozen or so direct hits with a greatsword, or surviving deadly poisons, or wrestling giants, or being able to backstab a god, or slaying a dragon, or other such fantasy fare. This even emerges well before LV 10, and D&D has been explicit for the last 20 years that the PC's you play are NOT "normal people."

And still, if you make fighters more explicitly magical (give them magic items as a class feature, forex), you're somehow ruining the "martial" vibe.

Yep. And in truth for me, none of that has ever bothered me at all. But we hear all the time from people here on the boards that the game needs more "mundane classes" and that the game has "too much magic"... so I'm just trying to figure out how that kind of thing could actually occur?

 

[Clint_L]

I do think, though, that one way to solve the divide would be to make martials not just provably better at combat but obviously better at combat.

Welcome to D&D2024. Unless you have an extreme AoE situation plus a caster with access to strong AoE spells, which they happened to have prepared, martial classes utterly dominate combat.

For example, my current level 8 monk does a base damage of 56 HP every round while also automatically applying the poison condition and forcing the target to make a save or be grappled. No caster at level 8 has anything close to that kind of reliable impact, round in, round out.

 

[Minigiant]

Absolutely. Which is why whenever the argument occurs here on these boards about how high-level Fighter abilities should be fluffed (either entirely as mundane, or as the Fighter slowly creeping into the super / preternatural realm to explain their abilities)... the answer should always be the same:

The player who wants their martial characters to never be magical and only do the stuff a "highly-trained but regular person" can do... they really should just end their campaigns at like Level 10. Not because the game can't legitimately have high-level abilities for those types of classes... but because to have those martial characters be balanced against high-level spellcasters, those characters will need to do things at a power level that most other people would probably not define as mundane, but rather as magical

Or

Or

Make them 2 different classes.

One class assumes you get Excalibur and Angel Armor.
One class assumes you get super strength and bulletproof skin.

The problem today with D&D is the official IP holder doesn't make new classes anymore and 3PP can only either rewrite the whole game or design on the margins.

 

[DEFCON 1]

There there is no section of "fighter" fans openly calling for the nursing and limitation of the fighter class.

The people demanding fighters beginner friendly, limited in scope, and have a restricted number of described permissive features were not folk who had Fighter as they top 3 classes.

Because they were concerned what Fighters couldn't do not what they could not. This why fighters stopped getting new features before tier 3. Defining what a tier 3 or 4 fighter would upset these false fighter fans.

1) I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that the people who want Fighters to be a "beginner friendly" class have it at any particular point on their "List of Favorites" scale, let along not in their "Top 3". I don't know how you have determined this is at all true for yourself... but I've yet to see it.

2) Someone who would fall into your definition of a "False Fighter fan" is not the same person as the "Wizard fan" others in this thread have claimed exists. A person can want Fighters to be mechanically simple classes without them also having to be a person that screams that not a single other class even comes close to the supposed power-level of the Wizard. A "Wizard fan" as defined by those folks more often than not wouldn't give a rat's ass about how beginner-friendly the Fighter class is.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Or

Or

Make them 2 different classes.

One class assumes you get Excalibur and Angel Armor.
One class assumes you get super strength and bulletproof skin.

The problem today with D&D is the official IP holder doesn't make new classes anymore and 3PP can only either rewrite the whole game or design on the margins.

It wouldn't be the IP holder who would have the problem of there being two different classes for these two different types of warrior... it'd be half of all the fans of the "Fighter" class that would be pissed off if their side of the class was the one that got made into a new class that was given a different class name and no longer called the "Fighter".

See: All those Fighter fans that could not accept in 4E that the "ranged fighter" concept was now meant to be done by taking the Ranger class, and that the "Fighter" was now only meant to be the 'tank' concept.

 

[Pedantic]

Are you talking about adding say a "mechanical system" to social interactions (beyond just standard skill checks?) So RPGs should remove the conceptual idea of a player coming up with something to say or do in their head and then improvising their expression of those ideas to the DM... and instead just make all of it into a codified "game system"?

My first reaction to something like that would be "Heck, no, why remove the best and most important part of what a roleplaying game is and replacing it with dice rolling and charts?"... but it is quite possible that I am misunderstanding what it is you are talking about. But if I am indeed understanding what you meant correctly, then I'd say "Heck, no, why remove the best and most important part of what a roleplaying game is and replacing it with dice rolling and charts?"

I'm not describing "negotiation" in the game, I'm describing the core gameplay loop of negotiating with the GM; player proposes an action, GM proposes a DC and/or range of possible effects, GM describes what actually happens after dice are rolled. Ideally everyone discussed what would happen sufficiently that the player is happy with that description on either success or failure.

Which is to yes, I'm proposing charts (less sold on dice rolling, but it's fine) for most actions that are likely to occur, thus that a player proposing an action knows how it will be resolved.

 

[Minigiant]

1) I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that the people who want Fighters to be a "beginner friendly" class have it at any particular point on their "List of Favorites" scale, let along not in their "Top 3". I don't know how you have determined this is at all true for yourself... but I've yet to see it

I said they don't.

The fans trying to jam the simplest version Champion fighter likely didn't have fighter as their top 3 favorites. The Champion was the biggest detriment to the design of the 5e fighter.

2) Someone who would fall into your definition of a "False Fighter fan" is not the same person as the "Wizard fan" others in this thread have claimed exists. A person can want Fighters to be mechanically simple classes without them also having to be a person that screams that not a single other class even comes close to the supposed power-level of the Wizard. A "Wizard fan" as defined by those folks more often than not wouldn't give a rat's ass about how beginner-friendly the Fighter class is.

Thats why I moved to Wizard Supremacy than Wizard Fandom. Because it's more about keeping nonwizards down than keeping wizards up.

 

[Charlaquin]

For the most part, this kind of complaint has largely been a "Yeah, so?" kind of issue. Wizards, and to an extent other high level casters, open up new ways to play or move across wide areas via plane shift, teleport, astral spells, wind walk, etc. But in my experience it's rare that they do it to tick off items on their personal agendas. These may change things in the campaign to a degree, a degree that may give the DM headaches, but the whole group generally benefits and takes part in the shenanigans that follow. And I'm not sure I've ever seen in actual play a spell caster enabling these things actively refuse to do them on behalf of one of the fellow players' agendas.
That's why so many of these kinds of things are just to me.

I mean, bully for you, but they are a big deal to a lot of other people, and I believe the true source of the caster vs. martial tension.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For the most part, this kind of complaint has largely been a "Yeah, so?" kind of issue. Wizards, and to an extent other high level casters, open up new ways to play or move across wide areas via plane shift, teleport, astral spells, wind walk, etc. But in my experience it's rare that they do it to tick off items on their personal agendas. These may change things in the campaign to a degree, a degree that may give the DM headaches, but the whole group generally benefits and takes part in the shenanigans that follow. And I'm not sure I've ever seen in actual play a spell caster enabling these things actively refuse to do them on behalf of one of the fellow players' agendas.
That's why so many of these kinds of things are just to me.

Ding!

For some reason in the conversations regarding what martial and caster characters can and can't do... the ability of the players to come up with ideas gets discounted. People talk about how Fighters can't "change the campaign" like Wizards can-- which maybe might be true "in-world" based on narratively what spells can and can't accomplish... but the Fighter player has just as much agency and ability to come up with campaign-altering ideas at the table as anyone else. The Fighter player can just say "Hey Bob! Why don't you have your Marko The Magnificent do X, Y, and Z to get us out of this situation?" At which point Bob says "Good idea!" and then tells the DM that Marko The Magnificent does X, Y, and Z. The Fighter player solved the problem, got to use their noggin to come up with something cool, saw their cool thing actually work... but yet somehow some people think that "doesn't count" for the Fighter player because it wasn't their PC specifically that did it.

To me, that's just silly. Yeah, I have my PC and the other players have their PCs... but I've always felt that all of us are actually just working together as part of a group, and that we all can and should be throwing out ideas for what all the characters can be doing, as though we all control all of them together. And thus it doesn't actually matter if it was "my PC" that accomplished "in-game" whatever it was I came up with... I was still the one who came up with the idea.