D&D 5E Casters vs Martials: Part 1 - Magic, its most basic components

[Asisreo]

Where I like wear your heart is, the rules go out of it's way to say "You can jump X far" (and even str 20 can't break the long jump record) and that fly lets you fly at speed 30. those two HAVE rules for a reason, yeah a DM can change either (I let PCs make athletics checks to jump beyond because I HATE the rule that basically says the 20th level fighter can't win the modern olympics) but that isn't a reason to not change the RAW...

But you can explicitly increase the distance you jump with an ability check, and that distance is undefined.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Both statements "I jump over the pit" and "I cast fly and fly over the pit" is the same question: "DM, can I use my abilities to bypass this obstacle?" Which the DM can respond with "Yes" or "No." And if the DM replies to the Martial "No." More than the casters specifically because he doesn't like the idea of a martial jumping a fantastical distance, the DM should realize that a magic caster is just as fantastical and the idea of magic being able to do impossible tasks like flying and teleporting is only reasonable because fantasy says that it is. But it's the same fantasy as the martial jumping impossible distances, within the genre.

I mean, I like where you are going here and think martials should have similar "bypass obstacle" power, but D&D isn't really a great ruleset to support this or highlight this, with some exceptions (4e skill challenges started to go here).

I guess 5e is somewhat easier to do this than 3e with its fairly undefined skills. Full casters get the same skills though. I guess you could have table rules that allow non casters "mythic use" of skills and full casters get more typical 5e "mundane use" of skills. But something this important should probably be explicitly outlined in the ruleset.

Fate does this -- there are some permissions associated with different skills and aspects but everything has the same "bypass obstacle" weight. "Fire Magic" skill or "Melee Fighting" skill just tells you how that bypass obstacle manifests itself in the fiction.

 

[HammerMan]

I guess 5e is somewhat easier to do this than 3e with its fairly undefined skills. Full casters get the same skills though. I guess you could have table rules that allow non casters "mythic use" of skills and full casters get more typical 5e "mundane use" of skills. But something this important should probably be explicitly outlined in the ruleset.

I can see it now:
P1 "I cast fly and go 60ft across the gap"
DM "No, there are underground winds that stop you from flying"
P2: "I make a super awesome jump check and increase my 20ft jump"
DM set DC and says "Okay roll athletics"
P1 "Why isn't the wind stopping his jump that just trippled?"

 

[Garthanos]

YEAH, Odysseus too. But that engineering right now is 100% DM fiat.

in 4e an implied use of skills like Dungeoneering/Nature perhaps

But you can explicitly increase the distance you jump with an ability check, and that distance is undefined.

silence supports ummm utter mundanity, just like the games players handbook saying without magic adventuring will be 10 times as difficult actually puts its foot squarely against other interpretations.

 

[Garthanos]

I mean, I like where you are going here and think martials should have similar "bypass obstacle" power, but D&D isn't really a great ruleset to support this or highlight this, with some exceptions (4e skill challenges started to go here).

Skill powers took some steps towards that also
Better martial practices would have taken more steps

 

[ECMO3]

So I was pondering the old arguments of casters vs martials. Fundamentally the concern about casters .....

I am starting to wonder if it is just time to do away with martials as PC options. As more and more content is published I think the options and power of the full casters pulls further and further ahead of the martials.

Why not just abandon the martials as PCs and keep them around as NPCs and hencmen only?

We could keep Rangers (since with Tasha's they are nearly full casters now anyway) and Rogues as they fill a unique niche, but get rid of Paladins, Fighters, Barbarians and Monk PCs.

Maybe offer a few more spells or feats for casters to take to get some of the unique Martial class abilities.

 

[Asisreo]

I mean, I like where you are going here and think martials should have similar "bypass obstacle" power, but D&D isn't really a great ruleset to support this or highlight this, with some exceptions (4e skill challenges started to go here).

My post before that was saying that "bypassing encounters" don't matter because anyone can overcome the encounters that matter, because that's how game design works. Even if you're caught in a situation where you need to fly but don't have access to it, the DM won't say "And they were never able to continue..." they'll just add a random carpet of flying or something.

In reality, abilities are only flavor. If a caster casts polymorph into T-rex, all they did was change somethings statistics for a limited time. Otherwise, the details don't matter. You could make the T-rex blue, gold, or wooden as long as the statistics are the same. In fact, it could even be a giant chicken if that's what they want.

Likewise, a martial can attack 2,000 times a second and the aggregate damage of those attacks are determined by RAW attack rules. Or you can have one Giant attack determined the same way. So your martial can cleave through the neck of an ogre in one slash or chop a dragon to bite-sized chunks. But the mechanics remain.

And that can be extended to out-of-combat. I don't think it would be unreasonable if the barbarian wanted to do a cool knee-drop entrance from 300ft and create a massive crater so long as he still takes the appropriate damage. The rogue can appear and disappear like a DragonBall z character, with the speed lines and all so long as they were hidden beforehand and not hidden afterwards.

The DM is being overly hostile if they won't let you flavor the mundane however so long as they allow magic to be flavored however they want.

 

[tetrasodium]

It doesn't, really. It's a game, after all.

While it's true one character can go invisible and another cannot, the implications of that entirely depend on the DM, even with the full list of what the condition means.

There's no nerfing required. Spells only do what they say they do, but I haven't seen any spell that compels the DM to allow the consequences beyond that to matter.

For example, let's say you have invisibility. There's a list of things this implies under it's conditions but the DM has all rights to cancel every single one of them. And they can do it sensibly too, without really even considering it.

You turn invisible: You can hide anywhere...but actually these guards have dogs and the DM considers dogs to rely on their nose, so they'll immediately notice your presence anyways within nose-shot. You have advantage on attacks and others have disadvantage on attacks...but this enemy has cleverly kicked dust up and can see you and partially obscure them, granting advantage on their attacks and disadvantage on their own, effectively negating that.

It really would be unfair if the DM does this very often...but it's within their discretion. The only thing the wizard could cast is "get up and leave the table" spell, but it's essentially a suicide spell.

So the perception that a martial cannot, say, jump 120ft off of an ability check without the DM is true, but the same can be said for the wizard that cannot fly to the other side of a chasm because a massive wind gust appeared.



My conclusion is that DM's are just too impermissive for characters not using spellcasting in general. And yes, a somehow equally strengthened wizard might be able to do the same thing as a martial, tied to the ability system, but it doesn't matter because the core question is less "can I do this over other players" and more "Will the DM even allow this?"

Both statements "I jump over the pit" and "I cast fly and fly over the pit" is the same question: "DM, can I use my abilities to bypass this obstacle?" Which the DM can respond with "Yes" or "No." And if the DM replies to the Martial "No." More than the casters specifically because he doesn't like the idea of a martial jumping a fantastical distance, the DM should realize that a magic caster is just as fantastical and the idea of magic being able to do impossible tasks like flying and teleporting is only reasonable because fantasy says that it is. But it's the same fantasy as the martial jumping impossible distances, within the genre.

I've seen things like that against casters. Since there were several instances of it in a recent frostmaiden campaign I was in & so much of this thread is utter disbelief that casters ever have trouble doing things I'll detail a few for clarity

• Caster does alter self to look like a kobold & "guide" his party into the kobold mine to make peace between kobolds/town with him serving as translator.
  • Everything seems to go great but the kobold leader wants to meet the mayor in town first. Players all seem to think this is reasonable given the kobolds are going to be employed as miners & have trade rights in town
    Spoiler: oops

    Leader immediately attacks he mayor "You should have rolled insight">combat>now there's a ghost in the caster too & you still need to go kill the kobolds
• Party sees a red dragon heart in duergar furnace & due to abject clueless "uhh does anyone get the feeling that the GM also has no idea wtf we should be doing or why there are suddenly duergar?" the players decide taking the heart out in order to stop the apparent nefarious plan from getting worse>
  • Caster notes that they can use unseen servant to pull it out safely>... caster
    Spoiler: oops no I can't for multiple reasons

    
    Ultimately someone shot it with an arrow that had plenty of time to pierce the heart & destroy the furnace without being burned up by the literal furnace capable of melting metal.
• Party kills the ancient white dragon in the region & is told at end of session that they levelup so come back a level higher next week.
  • Two wizards in the party strategize spell choice to recover maximum dragon giblits!
    • Combined they take
      Spoiler: enlarge/reduce

      '

      
      because 5e got rid of collosal and the dragon was gargantuan so
      Spoiler: dropping 4x4 to 2x2 makes it easily managable for the next step

      
      but
      Spoiler: GM:actuallyno it's still too big to carry

      

      plus the mini made for that dragon is wayy more
    • Both wizards sigh but contiunue as planned
      Spoiler: I cast fabricate he sez

      
      with the plan of fabricating the muscle tissue out of the object known as the dragon corpse into a meat block like you see in the grocery store deli sowe can just yoink the bones out through the open mouthinto a pile & leave with the entire skin relatively undamaged woth organs in tact.
    • GM: "I don't think muscle is close enough to material for that, it needs to be like stone wood metal crystal & since it has no saving throw I don't think that can work"
    • Spoiler: Teleport circle

      
      but the corpse won't fit in there soooooooo....
  • Ultimately after literally every shred of the wizard duo plan turns to ash the party druid/pally/cleric winds up using the paladin's dragonslayer sword & strength with nature/survival/arcana to carve off the wings
    • but omg it's bleeding lots & the gm tells us it's valuable blood. Lacking anything suitable to catch the blood one of the wizards tells everyone to step back because he's going to cast cone of cold & it can't bleed if it's frozen> GM: "It's immune to cold so still bleeding. Nobody else has plans & when asked if they have a anything else one wizard laughs & the other one pulls out his phone.
    • With both wizards having low strength noping out of this carving up the GM mentions that they might be able to user fabricate on bone but wizards feel quite justified in declaring that bone is probably valuable & that the others are doing fine.
  • The corpse is still way too big to fit in the circle even with reduce & the gm says that it needs to be put inside during the one turn the portal is active so having carved up the dragon . Party uses strength & who knows to bring the door from the frost giant castle nearby to the dragon corpse & fighter uses his smith's tools to fashion sled skis to the door. Wizards attempted to use floating disk to help at one point but are told the door is too big/heavy for those to be useful.
    • Having made a sled the party is told still too big & wizards tell the pally to go through a teleport circle wound up inside the tail to hire some minions on the other side so that a reduced dragon missing a tail with wings/neck carved off & tied atop the torso can be shoved through & dragged outside before reduce wears off & everyone is crushed by an expanding dragon in a small room.
  • corpse is pulled on sled by team of laborers through town & for some reason gm asks the wizards specifically what they are going to do about the bridge>In unison the pair says "I don't care" with one going on to add "we grabbed all those spells & went through all of this to help the rest of the party get this corpse back to town so they could get the awesome stuff they were talking about crafted from it. That's someone else's problem to solve"
    • Solved by the paladin making a charisma persuade check.

guidance and suggestion yes, but 4e put it in the players hands. it took all DM fiat away and let the game flow.

Yes 4e did do that to cut the gm's role back rather than correcting the worldbuilding problems linked to 1e's dying earth roots & an omission in FR . That doesn't mean that turning the GM into a life support system for the PCs was a good design choice. 5e ditched that like a mold covered mystery leftover found in the back of the fridge though so it seems that mistake was proven to be one

yes and no. I have seen MANY DMs say no magic item shops in 5e. You can with a quick search find many threads here about it. Now my group just house ruled a bunch of stuff, so we don't have the issue, but WoTC can fix it for everyone else...

(Funny related tangent: We ha a 3.5 game where the DM spent like a dozen games telling us we could not buy magic items, that nobody sold them... then a player tried to sell a +1 short sword and the NPC said "Sure, 1,000 gp" and the player was taken back and said "Try again you can't buy one for 30,000gp why would I take 1,000?" and the DM forgeting his own world said "yeah its worth 2,000gp and i still have to sell it for a profit" so the player came back with "If you can take me to this fantastical market where such wares are sold for only 2,000gp I will gift you this blade" that got us all to burst out laughing and the DM going red faced...)

Some of that links to the 1e dying earth roots & the omission of

Spoiler: this magic item economy footnote from FRCS

. Other settings like eberron took steps to correct that with an economy that included suppliers. Despite practically serving as an FR sourcebook at times the 5e phb also omitted mention of that important bit of FR's magic item economy

 

[TheOneGargoyle]

The conversation, at least insofar as I've been concerned, has been related to the differences in the capabilities of martials vs. casters. What are the differences in the things they can do?

Yes, but what sort of martial? "Martial" is a very broad bucket term, it's not a character concept. How are you going to discuss the mechanics of what a char can do, vs what it should be able to do, if you don't have a concept to relate it to ?

Should a martial be able to fly ? Should a martial be able to create earthquakes ? Should a martial be able to power word kill ?
How would I know how to make an assessment of those things ?

Should a barbarian of the storm be able to throw around lightning bolts ? Ooh, now that I can see, b/c it totally fits the concept. Let's have a mechanics discussion about how much dmg those lightning bolts should do and also a story discussion about how it happens - do primal spirits fight for/with them, do they channel the power of their ancestors, does their rage manifest in physical elemental form, etc. Should a barbarian of the storm be able to change into a dragon ? Umm ... no I don't think so, because I can't see any link to the char concept.

Should a draconic instinct barbarian be able to transform into a dragon ? Oooh, yeah that might work, let's a conversation about the mechanics of the dragon form to ensure it's balanced and a story conversation about how it happens - does their rage make them forget their identity and an ancestral one takes over, etc. Should a draconic instinct barbarian be able to throw around lightning bolts ? Umm ... well .... probably not because it doesn't seem to fit the concept.

See what I mean ? To me, in order to have any sort of meaningful dialog about mechanics, I would think we need to understand what sorts of char concepts those mechanics relate to. Not every martial character should be able to do every sort of supernatural, fantastical, magical thing that exists just b/c they're "a martial". So what should they be able to do ? Well, it depends on the char concept.

The abilities are those spelled out within the rules of the book. I can RP a billionaire character all day long, but if I don't have the right amount of gp on my character sheet, I won't be able to spend like a billionaire.

Of course. But this has nothing to do with whether the character is a martial or a caster. This is about getting DM buy-in to play a char concept that has implications for the shared world. You would need this regardless of whether you are wanting to play a martial or a caster.

Similarly with the ability to fly, break things, etc. A cooperative GM may allow those things to happen, but where they are not explicitly defined, I can't count on my character being able to do those things.

And I absolutely agree with you here. That's why I think some of those things you pointed out in PF2e are so good! More of those in D&D would be awesome. But which ones, for whom ?

The point is you don't end up with two full Arthurs. You end up with one by the book Arthur, and one significantly weaker wannabe, because one got Excalibur and can do all the King Arthur stuff that Excalubur let's them do, and one didn't get Excalibur, so they can't do that King Arthur stuff.

Sure, but this is just b/c that example happened to have a magic sword. The exact same thing is true of a Miyamoto Musashi WITH the Sword of Kas and one without. The one without can't do the stuff the one with it can do.

For your two Morganas, as far as I'm aware there is not an Excalibur equivalent, or if there is, it does not play as large a role in what she can do. So you may wind up with one being more powerful than the other, but they are both Morgana since they both can do all the things Morgana is able to do.

To simplify, taking magic items away from a caster generally makes way less of a difference to their abilities than taking them away from martial.

Ok, now this is something we can have a mechanics discussion about !
What would be the big caster items ?
Staff of Power & Robe of the Archmagi ? +4 AC, spell attack and save DC - the spell save DC is likely to go from 18-ish up to about 22-ish
What about for martials ?
Pick any 2 of the following: Armour+3, Shield+3, Weapon+3 & Belt of Giant Str (I guess depending on whether you're going for offense of defense or a mix of both ?) - those are pretty impactful too.
Do you think they make way more difference than the caster ones ? I'm not convinced that's so.

So, the argument requires a martial to max out two abilities that none of their class abilities work with (presumably having to dump their primary and secondary ability scores to do so), and a DM that allows a character to have hundreds of thousands of gold from a Background choice?
Am I understanding that correctly?

LOL no, that was in reference to whether the game rules support being able to play the character concept you want!

Now, in many games, while that much gold does not translate to magic items, it would still be effective for many out-of-combat challenges. I do have reservations as to how well such a character would actually perform on most games however.

Agreed. Although, again, if the player wants to play Batman in D&D, and the DM is on board, why not?

I think that impression came from when you took the discussion of the mechanics difference between casters and martials using the King Arthur example as just being about the story.
Twice.

Ok, then I haven't managed to get across what I was trying to. I was trying to say that the char concept should come first, and then the mechanics should be evaluated against that, not just in a white room vacuum.
eg, if a player wants to play a Stalwart Guardian type character, there's not a lot of point of comparing the DPR output of this character compared to a blaster sorcadin and saying "See ? The martial gets the raw end of the deal again!"
Does that make more sense ?

No, the point that both GammaDoodler and myself were trying to explain to you is that the Fighter needs Excalibur and the rulership of England (both of which can only be granted by a generous DM) to be considered King Arthur - equivalent and at the same capability as Morgana is without the DM generosity.

Again, that's just b/c in that example the fighter came with a magic item as an integral part of the story and the wizard didn't. Some stories reverse that, Sauron comes with The One Ring as part of his story and wouldn't be the same without it - whereas Aragorn can be King of Gondor without a ring of power (or without Narsil either).

We're not claiming that "Morgana, wielder of the Staff of Power" is at the same power level as Morgana with just class features. We're pointing out that in general, King Arthur needs the DM to grant them the trappings in order to operate at the same level as Morgana without special treatment, and a fighter without the DM granting them special benefits is very much less capable and fun.

I agree there is a disparity in capability and that this heavily influences the fun factor. My thinking on where to go from there is: martial characters should have more awesome things baked into their classes that they can do at high levels that don't rely on external factors like magic items and world-building (I think we agree on this?), but (maybe this is where we differ?) these things should be based on & make sense for their char concepts and the story the player & DM want to tell.

DM generosity is always nice, but it shouldn't be required for specific classes.

100% agree on this.
The opposite is also true IMHO, mechanics should be balanced enough, and char concepts & stories should be well defined & collaboratively created enough that it's not just about whether the DM is feeling generous or not, it's about does it make sense and is it a good story.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

For your two Morganas, as far as I'm aware there is not an Excalibur equivalent, or if there is, it does not play as large a role in what she can do. So you may wind up with one being more powerful than the other, but they are both Morgana since they both can do all the things Morgana is able to do.

To simplify, taking magic items away from a caster generally makes way less of a difference to their abilities than taking them away from martial.

Without availability of useful magic items in the form of scrolls to write into their spellbooks, the wizard is a glorified sorcerer, knowing only 2 spells per level, not something that allow the broad appeal of the wizard, able to perform in any situation if given enough advance notice.