D&D General Chris just said why I hate wizard/fighter dynamic

[DND_Reborn]

For Wizards, you start with six 1st level spells of your choice in your book. Each time you level you can add two spells of your choice to your spellbook for free. You need to find the others. It takes 2 hours and 50gp per level to copy them over. If you lose your spell book you can put the ones you prepared into a new spell book for 1 hour and 10gp per level.

LOL yeah, I know all that, my post was in response to @Lanefan asking about provisions for copying spells from a guild, etc.

 

[Oofta]

The game can be played without magic items............FACT. But you can't fight most of the creatures in the monster manuals without magic.........FACT. So you can play a game without any magic items at all. I don't recall them saying you could do everything in the game without magic items. They aren't going to tell people that like nitty gritty low magic games that thier game sucks for those people. That would be terrible marketing. But it is the truth. But I haven't seen any lies actually proven. Just assumptions that they meant more than they actually said.

I just did a filter on DndBeyond and there are 50 entries that require a magical weapon to do damage out of 2,020 total entries. So the fact is that approximately 97.5 percent of the monster entries do not require a magic weapon to damage them.

I always assume magic weapons in my game after a certain point, but we don't have the treadmill of +X at Level Y that we had in some of the previous editions. There are also, obviously, plenty of options if you don't have a single magic weapon.

 

[DND_Reborn]

FWIW, we hardly ever use magic items in our games anymore, but admittedly our recent games have not made it into tiers 3 or higher yet...

Personally, I've found I enjoy the game more without them. It makes me feel like my character, and the others, more directly deal with the challenges. And in case anyone is wondering, I am not adjusting the monsters to compensate, I just use monsters that make sense to the narrative/story.

 

[Mordhau]

I honestly think the implementation of magic weapon, silver, cold steel etc is broken. I've considered trying out fey only hurt by Cold steel weapons. Lycanthropes only hurt by silver, etc. It would definitely change how scared people would be of fey and Lycanthropes and other odd ball creatures that their big shiny toys won't hurt.

Context dependent. They mean the game doesn't assume magic items as necessary to keep up with the math of the game as in 4e or 3e.

So a magic item is pure bonus.

(Of course this solves nothing).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The game can be played without magic items............FACT. But you can't fight most of the creatures in the monster manuals without magic.........FACT. So you can play a game without any magic items at all. I don't recall them saying you could do everything in the game without magic items. They aren't going to tell people that like nitty gritty low magic games that thier game sucks for those people. That would be terrible marketing. But it is the truth. But I haven't seen any lies actually proven. Just assumptions that they meant more than they actually said.

It also isn’t inevitable that the game will suck without magic items.

People interpreted what they said wrong.

They said the game math doesn't assume magic items.
The game still assumes the fighter is stacked with magic items or friendly magic buffs.

It doesn’t. It assumes literally the ability to make their weapon attacks magical. That’s it. That’s a far cry from “stacked” like a “Christmas tree”.

They also made it easy to play without the items or buffs. But you can't use most of the middle and high CR monsters if you do that.

Sure, but again, that just means that some source of magical weapon attacks is assumed.

They specifically said in Xanathar's that the situation where magic items become borderline necessary is very rare. No spellcasters, no monks, no NPCs to cast Magic Weapon. That certainly has been very rare in my experience, but maybe you're coming from a different perspective.

Not only that, but the books presents this as the o ly time any magic items become necessary. It says nothing about the loot tables representing the assumptions of the game.

There is absolutely no evidence that things like boots of flying are remotely taken into account as part of the balance of any class.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I just did a filter on DndBeyond and there are 50 entries that require a magical weapon to do damage out of 2,020 total entries. So the fact is that approximately 97.5 percent of the monster entries do not require a magic weapon to damage them.

I always assume magic weapons in my game after a certain point, but we don't have the treadmill of +X at Level Y that we had in some of the previous editions. There are also, obviously, plenty of options if you don't have a single magic weapon.

Yeah absolutely. I have a campaign going wherein there may not be any magic items, and if there are they’ll be wondrous items, not weapons, and I’ve played in similar games.

You and I my disagree on whether there is a problem with the high level fighter overall, but the magic weapon thing is not it.

 

[Bagpuss]

yeah i want both... if (imagine numbers out of butt) wizards are at 12 and fighters at 7 bring them both to 10...

spellcasters have grown to far and fighters (who started behind) have only grown a bit, and in some ways lost ground.

Play 4th Edition then. It did a lot to level the playing field.

It's odd when the they made a game that answered a lot of the complaints people made about, disparity between classes, action economy, draw out fights, etc. etc. People decided it wasn't what they wanted after all.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Then which class becomes the baseline?

Somebody has to be the baseline, otherwise all comparisons become meaningless. If not the Fighter, then who?

The third idea above - extra proficiencies etc. - is excellent.

The second and fourth ideas - each involving turning failures into successes - are way too meta for me.

That is what I said. The default out the box 5e fighter was designed under the assumption that they have supernatural power from magic items or friendly buffs.

The monsters were designed under the assumption that they would be challenged by a fighter with magic items.

Magic Items can be substituted by friendly PC spells but you would not be able to handle as many encounters per day. 5-7 instead of 6-8.

Magic items and PC magic buffs can be replaced with NPC magic buffs. But then you have DMPCs.

If you say No to all of that, you can't fight all the CR11+ demons, devils, golems, fey, undead, and dragons in the MM. I've said that from the start.

Oof. Yeah that is not at all the same as your previous claim. If you intended to claim the above, you communicated very poorly.

You know that there is a very large difference between “some source of magical weapon attacks” and “stacked with magic items” such that the fighter resembles a “Christmas tree” with a bare minimum of 4 permanent magic items by high level, but more usually 8+, right?

It’s not just a case of hyperbole, the two statements simply do not mean the same thing. Claiming one is not the same as claiming the other.

As before, all the game assumes is that the fighter will have some way of dealing damage to most enemies, most of the time, and that they will do so more effectively than most other characters on an at-will basis.

Hell, just an ability at level 11 to ignore resistence and immunity to non magical damage would completely erase the one tiny vestigial need for exactly 1 magic item per purely mundane PC, at most, in cases without party buffs.

An enormous gulf exists between this and your earlier posts.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Play 4th Edition then. It did a lot to level the playing field.

It's odd when the they made a game that answered a lot of the complaints people made about, disparity between classes, action economy, draw out fights, etc. etc. People decided it wasn't what they wanted after all.

Some of us never played it.

Nor do we all have access to it or want to buy it when we already have a game to play...

 

[Cadence]

Play 4th Edition then. It did a lot to level the playing field.

It's odd when the they made a game that answered a lot of the complaints people made about, disparity between classes, action economy, draw out fights, etc. etc. People decided it wasn't what they wanted after all.

It's almost like a lot of people think 4e went too far away from 1/2/3/3.5 in terms of what they felt D&D had been though (and there were massive threads of arguing about everything, and doing that now probably gets one booted from here). And so those folks would have like something maybe that took some of 4e's best ideas and spliced them in to the older stuff (like what 5e has done and maybe could do more - which has been vaguely popular) and then then tuned it (which we're debating about).