Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6279236" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, you began the discussion with the 1E Cavalier, lets return there.The 1E Cavalier as presented only barely has a mounted aspect.  More attention is paid to the Cavalier's relationship to his armor than to his mount.  Much more attention is paid to the Cavalier's artistocratic background (another set of new rules in the UE) and his code of honor than to his mount.The 1E Cavalier IIRC had the following abilities:1) Improved mounted combat2) Automatic specialization (equalivent, though slightly mechanically different) in the lance, sword, and a secondary weapon3) Slow improvement in STR, CON, and DEX that was rougly equivalent (assuming you had a 16 or better) to getting a free wish to improve his attributes in each every level.  This was particularly huge if you could start with 18 in those abilities, particularly strength.4) Improved starting wealth5) Fear resistanceAnd probably some other things.  It's not at all clear to me that the key element of this is, despite the name, horsemanship, but the idea of an elite upper class warrior trained from birth.   The Cavalier is just the Westernized implementation of that general concept; Samurrii would be another example of the same concept in different cultural trappings.   Certainly in play, the Cavalier was not inferior to the fighter, and was in fact probably superior to the fighter - even when not mounted.   Combat by a player with a mounted Cavalier was rare in my experience, not that they weren't awesome when doing so, but that they were fully effective without it.The problem I have isn't so much the balance issue now, which we have the tools to fix, it's that until the Cavalier came along and stole it mounted combat was also the priviledge of the fighter.  It narrowed the concept of the fighter to create a mounted combat specialist.Likewise, before them, inspiring and leading fighting men was also part of the domain of the fighter - as implemented by the idea that name level for a fighter was 'Lord' and would come eventually with the possession of followers and a castle.Likewise, I feel that tactical skill and command in battle is also properly the sphere of the fighter.What I've seen over 30 years of the evolution of D&D is increasing diversity of spells, all of which get grouped into one of the two main categories of spellcasters vastly increasing the scope and sphere of options of spellcasters in the process.   At the same time I've also seen a vast increase in the number of classes, most of which are martial classes of some sort - Barbarian, Cavalier, Samurii, Knight, Marshall, Warlord, and so on and so forth - each of which coming with a range of narrow class abilities which then become their sphere of influence and all of which hedge out the same mechanical expansion of the original martial class(es) that is enjoyed by spellcasters via spell selection.What I think you'd actually accomplish with a Cavalier class is just taking stuff from the fighter class, creating a new class that probably at least as effective in raw power as the fighter in combat, but which also has more versitility and more options in and out of combat.  Ultimately, it would just further dismembering of the concept of the fighter until the fighter would be left with only 'hits things with sticks' in his concept and sphere of influence.  Then people would keep complaining about how martial classes couldn't get nice things, and how D&D classes broke into tiers of spellcasters and non-spellcasters with spellcasters in the higher tiers, and we'd continue to see pushes to make all classes including the fighter defacto spellcasters with their own list of magical powers.</blockquote>

Verification