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

[Maxperson]

Er, no I didn't. I said they had the same attack rolls. Because fighters aren't actually any better at fighting than anyone else. They can just make more attacks.

Attack rolls =/= fighting. They are simply one aspect of it. Nobody else gets 4 attacks a round, and that's a larger aspect of fighting than an attack roll. Maneuvers are another aspect of fighting. And there are others. Fighters are better at fighting, even if their attack rolls aren't better.

 

[Eubani]

Er, no I didn't. I said they had the same attack rolls. Because fighters aren't actually any better at fighting than anyone else. They can just make more attacks.

Eventually, on levels that most games don't reach.

 

[Aldarc]

Worlds Without Number: Fighters are the best at combat bar none. Experts are the best with non-combat skills bar none.

Mages have spells. Mages are meant to have a high impact with their spells and do extraordinary things with them. Their spells are potent but few. A max level High Magic Mage (10th level) - here ignoring partial mages or other mage traditions - can prepare 12 spells, but only cast six spells per day, with a cap at 5th level spells.

Compare this with a 10th level 5e Wizard, who can probably prepare 14 spells (10 + 4 Int) and cast four level 1 spells, three level 2 spells, three level 3 spells, three level 4 spells, and two level 5 spells, while also being able to cast any of those that are ritual spells without using a spell slot.

I weirdly realized in retrospect that I made a slight error with my earlier post quoted above, and although the conversation has long moved-on, I would like to nevertheless correct the record, notably in regards to the below portion:

Compare this with a 10th level 5e Wizard, who can probably prepare 14 spells (10 + 4 Int) and cast four level 1 spells, three level 2 spells, three level 3 spells, three level 4 spells, and two level 5 spells, while also being able to cast any of those that are ritual spells without using a spell slot.

This tabulation of available spell slots does not take into account the 5e Wizard's access to Arcane Recovery, which provides a 10th level wizard 1-5 additional spell slots depending on their choices: i.e., recovering five level 1 spells or one level 5 spell or the range of options between.

Still more useful. The wizard is likely trained in a bunch of Int skills, with a massive bonus. The Fighter? Athletics + a bunch of skills where other characters are likely stronger.

The game incentivizes building around and specializing in your better stats, which is why your Charisma-based classes will often fill the role of the party face and your Intelligence-based classes will fill the role of the party encyclopedia. People are not bad to build their characters in that way and people can also build their characters in ways that break that mold, but the game incentives are nevertheless there to specialize around your strengths when it comes to skills, though the necessity of Perception also tends to buck that trend.

 

[Fanaelialae]

They could much more easily but often killing the players is less important to them than obtaining a powerful cat's paw of a minion to do things they may not do themselves. It's not their fault that you happened to sleep in the clearing they used augury to predict you would sleep. Don't forget that this is in the context of you going back & forth with maxperson about just how low the bar for associated object is with posts like this. I've seen more than one player dig themselves holes like that over the years

Knock out poison kills in your campaign?

Augury only predicts weal or woe. I don't think there's a single divination spell in the entire game that can predict where someone will make camp for the night.

Like I said, PCs have lots of inevitable habits simply based on biology. They eat, they sleep, and they (ostensibly) go to the bathroom. If you can exploit someone grabbing a random item once a day, you can already exploit any of their biological necessities as well.

To be clear, on the off chance that an inexperienced DM stumbles onto this thread, as I see it your argument is predicted upon the abuse of DM fiat, and is exactly the sort of thing the DM should never do. As the DM, you always have the power to screw the PCs, because the DM can literally make anything happen. A good DM shows restraint with that power. The DMs that I've known who abuse that power tend to have a high turnover of players, when they can find a group at all.

 

[tetrasodium]

Knock out poison kills in your campaign?

Augury only predicts weal or woe. I don't think there's a single divination spell in the entire game that can predict where someone will make camp for the night.

Like I said, PCs have lots of inevitable habits simply based on biology. They eat, they sleep, and they (ostensibly) go to the bathroom. If you can exploit someone grabbing a random item once a day, you can already exploit any of their biological necessities as well.

To be clear, on the off chance that an inexperienced DM stumbles onto this thread, as I see it your argument is predicted upon the abuse of DM fiat, and is exactly the sort of thing the DM should never do. As the DM, you always have the power to screw the PCs, because the DM can literally make anything happen. A good DM shows restraint with that power. The DMs that I've known who abuse that power tend to have a high turnover of players, when they can find a group at all.

Player facing spells and the spells available to godlike entities engaging in godlike plots are different things. You however spent multiple posts trying to explain why raw allows jrandom objects to be your tether exactly like a player dismissing a gm's warnings because they think they found an exploitable loophole when the tm doesn't flat out block it. When the gm warns you & doesn't seem to do anything but keeps warning you.... That's when you messed up & you did so because you don't know what they don't tell you. I put a mimic in front of my players a couple of months ago... One of them loves it & continues to think its great even after discovering what it was almost a month of real world time a few seasons laterr.... Nothing fist about it. The other four are pretty scared of it because it's a giant unknown & after they tried to kill it based on player not pc knowledge the owner isn't excited to info dump derails on them so is enjoying the squirm. You dug your own hole on this by fighting for a bad idea with alsgrict raw & the player in my example would have done it anyways

 

[FrogReaver]

Player facing spells and the spells available to godlike entities engaging in godlike plots are different things. You however spent multiple posts trying to explain why raw allows jrandom objects to be your tether exactly like a player dismissing a gm's warnings because they think they found an exploitable loophole when the tm doesn't flat out block it. When the gm warns you & doesn't seem to do anything but keeps warning you.... That's when you messed up & you did so because you don't know what they don't tell you. I put a mimic in front of my players a couple of months ago... One of them loves it & continues to think its great even after discovering what it was almost a month of real world time a few seasons laterr.... Nothing fist about it. The other four are pretty scared of it because it's a giant unknown & after they tried to kill it based on player not pc knowledge the owner isn't excited to info dump derails on them so is enjoying the squirm. You dug your own hole on this by fighting for a bad idea with alsgrict raw & the player in my example would have done it anyways

IMO. Using DM fiat to add elements to the narrative just to make the spell not work - that's typically the kind of DM behavior that gets called railroading.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Player facing spells and the spells available to godlike entities engaging in godlike plots are different things. You however spent multiple posts trying to explain why raw allows jrandom objects to be your tether exactly like a player dismissing a gm's warnings because they think they found an exploitable loophole when the tm doesn't flat out block it. When the gm warns you & doesn't seem to do anything but keeps warning you.... That's when you messed up & you did so because you don't know what they don't tell you. I put a mimic in front of my players a couple of months ago... One of them loves it & continues to think its great even after discovering what it was almost a month of real world time a few seasons laterr.... Nothing fist about it. The other four are pretty scared of it because it's a giant unknown & after they tried to kill it based on player not pc knowledge the owner isn't excited to info dump derails on them so is enjoying the squirm. You dug your own hole on this by fighting for a bad idea with alsgrict raw & the player in my example would have done it anyways

Yes, gawds forbid a player should use a spell the way it is meant to be used. Clearly, rather than simply banning such a spell if you don't like it, you should punish the player using punitive fiat for not playing the game the way you demand. Obviously.

 

[tetrasodium]

IMO. Using DM fiat to add elements to the narrative just to make the spell not work - that's typically the kind of DM behavior that gets called railroading.

"a tree", "a stone", "a stone won't cut it" "here's why it will". There was no railroading, warnings were shoved aside with disdain.

If you are talking about the mimic example I gave, I'll give the whole context of that because it's important. Players were low level & dealing with a fairly typical evil necromancer doing evil* (stealing bodies from cemetery) that someone is willing to pay to have solved. After confirming that they did not want to waste time doing any scouting or anything the players charge in, spend ten or twenty minutes hacking through the front gate even though two players have a climb or fly speed & could have gone over to watch the undead preparing with some risk. Players fought two encounters on the line between easy & medium before declaring that they were going to barricade themselves in that there building to take a short rest. Despite warnings about it being a bad idea to storm in & do that they decided to do it anyways and some of them wanted to spend the short rest searching for treasure in the storeroom building even after being told that it would take hours & that there was not enough time to do so during a rest while surrounded by undead who were making noises outside. It was not until the noises stopped and they finished their short rest that the players decided to peek outside to find themselves surrounded by pitch soaked firewood with a torch bearing zombie headed their way. After spending an hour in close proximity to said mimic it's reasonable for it to telepathically pickup details like the cleric's god & disguise itself as a lantern that looks holy to gtfo before it too burns up Shedding light as an object that is intended to shed light is reasonably within the mimic's statblock abilities. The whole sequence was an exercise in simply handing out yard after yard of rope until they allowed the bad guy to escape & unwittingly walked away with a new friendmimic.

* little e evil & barely that

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I'm sure I will get accused of "white room" theory crafting...

how do you calculate non damage causeing spells into combat encounters?

So Save-or-suck is the idea that you have to succeed or it's terrible usually when we're talking about it with spells what it means is “I cast a certain spell” *gestures forward with his hand” and the enemy has to make a save and if the don't it's really really bad but if the do nothing really happens

so hold person/hold monster can take a monster out of the encounter for 1+ rounds....

[sblock=2nd level spell]
Hold Person is great

1. It’s a wisdom save which is a poor save for a lot of humanoids.
2. Adding levels to the spell adds more target.
3. In most campaigns humanoids remain common opponents.
4. Hitting a held foe is an auto-crit. (in melee)
5. Your save DC will scale as you level, but many of your foes Wisdom saves don’t scale at all and most of the ones that do scale don’t scale well.
   1. That 4 CR Hobgoblin Devastor it’s got a +1 Wis save.
   2. That 12 CR Warlord a +1 Wis save.
   3. Even that 9 CR Necromancer has a mere +5 wisdom save, which by the time you are 8th level it’s around a 50% chance of failure.
6. It’s available to all primary spell casters

[/sblock]

in a campaign (and forget white room I have played in and run such games) where half or more of the high level encounters were 'non monster' monsters (hobgoblins, humans, elfs, dwarfs, dragonborn)

suggestion, Hideous laughter, and web can all incapacitate in one way or another a target.

at low levels casters can only do this 1 or 2 times a day and it eats into there ability to do other things. at mid levels these are pittance costs.

higher level ones are worst... banishment has been used SO many times to just end non legendary encounters (both by me and my PCs)

so the fighter can throw a ton of damage, and can hit well, the wizard can (with cantrips) throw about 1/2 that damage with the same ratio to hit, a warlock can keep up with the fighter at will... but ON TOP of that they can cast monster ending spells.

is there anything a fighter can do as powerful as this first level spell "The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or fall prone, becoming incapacitated and unable to stand up for the duration."

at 20th level a fighter can swing 4 times action surge swing 4 more times and second wind to get 1d10+20hp back... 8 attacks and heal is most likely the best round of combat a fighter will ever have (giving a 22 str +3 weapon and power attacking (and remember that is -5 to hit) that is 2d6+19 reroll 1's and 2's so minimum damage is 25 per hit max is 31) the best round a 1st level wizard can have is targeting someone with a -1 wis save with laugh and having a DC 12 so they need a 13+ to make the save (60% chance it lands and 60% chance it lasts a second round) taking a monster right out of the fight even if they have 10,000hp

 

[FrogReaver]

"a tree", "a stone", "a stone won't cut it" "here's why it will". There was no railroading, warnings were shoved aside with disdain.

The spell itself says

“Associated object” means that you possess an object taken from the desired destination within the last six months, such as a book from a wizard’s library, bed linen from a royal suite, or a chunk of marble from a lich’s secret tomb.

"A chunk of marble, a bed linen, a book...." I don't see any qualitative difference in those objects and a branch.