D&D 5E (2024) CoDzilla? Yeah Na Its CoDGFaW.

[EzekielRaiden]

Various weapons had wish soells in them. Wizards coukd create them (losing a con point permanently)

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."

You couldn't scam that stuff bit AD&D were loaded up with lavish amounts of loot.

Oh boy, don't open that can of worms. Possibly the earliest edition-war-like argument the community has ever had is the dispute over "Monty Haul".

Wizards generally didnt dominate combat. Tgey had to few hp in AD&D, capped hit points from con modifier and if the game did go to high level fighters were still useful to have around. Magic resistance could be 90%, resolving spells was horrible. 3E removed a lot of restrictions.

Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."

I suspect most games then also ended by 7-10 so you never saw high level Wizards except as NPC antagonists.

I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.

In 5.5 themes rares started dropping lvl 3, very rare and legendaries dropped lvl 5-7 and you got lots of them. A sword you found level 5 could still be used 10 levels later (unlikely the gane ran that long but still).

I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.

I saw a 2E fighter solo a dragon, lich, marilith one after the other 1 round each.

Okay. That's a neat achievement for that player. Sincerely; I worry you might take my words there as sarcasm, but I swear I mean it with full sincerity.

But this leads to the actual question: Is this good evidence that the Fighter class, as it existed in that edition, has stronger tools, greater reach, or higher efficacy than an equivalent Wizard with an equal degree of appropriate treasure rewards and equivalent system mastery?

Fighters had best saves, best initiative in effect (if you used the advanced rules we did), and magic armor boosted some saves.

They had stronger passive stats, yes. Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot, because the numbers are literally right there, for all to see.

But better passive stats is not the same as being the thing which achieves victory most, the thing which is the most efficient at translating actions into results, nor the thing which has the greatest breadth and/or depth of impact.

A smart, well-played Wizard with good Wizard equipment and a reasonable input of spells, even if they're randomly determined, is simply going to be able to achieve radically more than an equal-level, equal-skill, equal-equipment Fighter could. Yes, the Wizard will likely still desire the help of meat shields between themselves and their enemies. That's what mercenary hires are for. Hell, you can even sweeten the deal by offering all those Fighter-related magic items that were secretly a Fighter class feature that was never written down (and thus subsequently forgotten by the WotC designers.)

Wizards don't need Fighters half as much as Fighters need Wizards--because Fighters need their magic items far more than Wizards need theirs, and only one of the two can actually make magic items. I guarantee you that that Fighter you mentioned could not have taken those three extremely dangerous enemies without absolute scads of magic items, all of which came from a Wizard at some point. "I took down three mega-powerful creatures! .....because I was loaded up with power given to me by 8 Wizards" kinda blunts the impact of the achievement, don't you think? I certainly do.

And the game flowed a lot faster and easier to run than 3E-5E. 2E was also the best tool box D&D.

It's statements like these which made me believe you thought 2e was simply superior to all other editions of D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes...exactly. But even if they weren't a powergamer, as the first player was not (or I imagine you'd have mentioned it), would you agree that simply by choosing to play a Cleric or Druid, their characters would have an inherent leg up over essentially anyone else? They'd just be...better at succeeding than someone who didn't pick one of those things. Do you agree?

To a point. There's many other aspects to the game that determine character survivability, the biggest and most important of which is sheer random chance which is the most powerful balancer of them all. However, if randomness is downplayed then...

Because if you do, then you and I already agree on the fundamental point of balance: that there should not be classes that are simply, objectively better than other choices, nor should there be options which are most of the time strictly better, but which might be equivalent or ever-so-slightly-worse in specific, narrow/niche situations.

...the designers have to get into this morass of weeds, made more difficult all the time by their addition of new classes, species, feats, and other (potential) sources of power.

I believe that it may be the most fun class to play.

It is, objectively, not the most effective class to play. Because magic, especially in TSR editions, is overwhelmingly more powerful than anything else you could try (except possibly psionics, but that's just a parallel track of supernatural power).

Magic is extremely useful in utility and non-combat situations but for reliable damage output per round the post-UA 1e Fighter is king, queen, and royalty.

Sure. Here's the problem: Those fixes do achieve the goal of limiting the otherwise incredibly stupid power levels of casters. They do so by being extremely frustrating and un-fun, at least for most players.

"You can have phenomenal cosmic power, but we'll constantly make you hate your life for trying to get it" is not good game design. It just...isn't. "Have a bad time in order to be SUPER SUPER SUPER POWERFUL" is bad design. I'm sorry. There's just no other way to put it. Making the most effective tools feel bad to use is just...why would you do that? Why would you put something into your game that rewards using it by being the most powerful thing anyone can do, only to then say "BUUUUUT if you DO try to use it, you're going to be extremely bored and frustrated most of the time." That's bad! That's...that's literally not what games are designed for.

This is, and previously has been, a fairly fundamental disagreement between us: I see not-constant player-side frustration as not only being an acceptable part of the game but an essential part of the game.

Games should, to at least some extent, be actually fun to play in the ways that the rules reward. That doesn't mean they need to make the player maximally, perfectly blissed-out happy every nanosecond of every session forever. But it means that designing a system with "phenomenal power" only held back by "the GM can nerf things if they feel like it" and "it's really dull and un-fun to USE that phenomenal power" is bad design. It's a game that is dull and frustrating to play in the way it's actually written, and only exciting and fun when someone goes through and literally rewrites it dynamically behind the scenes, meaning the players aren't even playing a "game" at all, they're playing "who gets to be the GM's favorite today".

The fun comes when you pull it off.

The baseball batter doesn't get a hit every time at the plate (a really good hitter might get a hit 1/3 of the time) and much less often hits a home run, but it's sure fun for them when they do.

3e absolutely did not "rein in" arcane casters. Like...at all. The Wizard does just fine, and the Sorcerer is only less-fine because it has fewer spells and fewer slots for no good reason but "we wanted to punish spontaneous casting" I guess.

My own experience is that the Wizards in our group (of which there were two main ones, I played one), while certainly useful, weren't up to par with the Cleric and, later, Druid.

Of course, you know that my opinion of 4e is different from yours. All I'll say is, they may have gone overboard in SOME ways, but not nearly as many as folks accuse them of. Which is pretty typical, because most people who poo-poo 4e either don't know or don't care what 4e actually did, they only care about blasting it as hard, as often, and as thoroughly as possible.

My point was more that WotC designers have built up a pretty solid track record, across the 3 editions and 2 half-editions they've done, of coming up with what could be a good idea and then completely overcooking it. A light touch is not their forte.

Frankly, I've never actually seen this. Like ever. I hear it complained about all the time from the "PlAyEr EnTiTlEmEnT" crowd, which gets so incredibly irritating. But I have literally never seen it, and when I ask people who complain about it, they have to defer because they haven't actually seen it either, they just (allegedly) hear about it.

Missing too much, however, should be unacceptable. Because if you miss most of the time, that sucks. It's boring, and not in the constructive "you're building toward a cool thing" way, it's just "and now you continue to be Absolute Garbage at the thing you're supposed to do Fairly Well". I mean, for God's sake, we have a class called "Fighter". You would think such a person would be, I dunno, exceptionally good at FIGHTING.

See above re baseball hitters - they're really good at what they do and yet the very best of 'em still only get a hit about 1/3 of the time. (there was one guy in the 1940s-50s named Ted Williams who had a 40% hit rate for a few years; he was a real outlier even among great hitters and nobody's got consistently close to him since)

I suspect that if the average success ratio in D&D - both in melee attacks and spellcasting - was reduced to 1-in-3 there's be howls of protest from all directions. And yet it's fine for baseball and has been for about 130 years now.....

 

[Lanefan]

Can they cast wish?

Most 1e games tapped out at 'name level', i.e. the 9th-11th range, which is a way long time before Wish comes online. BECMI went higher, as did 2e in some cases.

That said, my namesake character Lanefan - a pure Fighter through and through who recently got his 11th level - has in his career personally cast two* Wishes via device.

* - or maybe three, I might be forgetting one. One revived half a party, the other got his keep built.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."

This assumes Wizards create all magic items, which while perhaps true in some campaigns or settings is by no means universal.

Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."

If a Fighter can miss x-percent of the time with her attacks then IMO it's only fair that a caster shouldn't be 100% reliable either.

The big miss in all editions was allowing casters to place their AoE spells without requiring a roll to hit or aim.

I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.

Worth noting those characters were from versions earlier than 1e, and in 1e he intentionally designed the game to soft-cap at the 9th-11th range - probably because he had learned the hard way that the wheels fall off if you go much higher than that.

I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.

Not from me, you haven't.

5e treasure, at least in the quite-a-few modules I've read, is pathetic except at high to very high level.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."


Oh boy, don't open that can of worms. Possibly the earliest edition-war-like argument the community has ever had is the dispute over "Monty Haul".


Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."


I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.


I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.


Okay. That's a neat achievement for that player. Sincerely; I worry you might take my words there as sarcasm, but I swear I mean it with full sincerity.

But this leads to the actual question: Is this good evidence that the Fighter class, as it existed in that edition, has stronger tools, greater reach, or higher efficacy than an equivalent Wizard with an equal degree of appropriate treasure rewards and equivalent system mastery?


They had stronger passive stats, yes. Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot, because the numbers are literally right there, for all to see.

But better passive stats is not the same as being the thing which achieves victory most, the thing which is the most efficient at translating actions into results, nor the thing which has the greatest breadth and/or depth of impact.

A smart, well-played Wizard with good Wizard equipment and a reasonable input of spells, even if they're randomly determined, is simply going to be able to achieve radically more than an equal-level, equal-skill, equal-equipment Fighter could. Yes, the Wizard will likely still desire the help of meat shields between themselves and their enemies. That's what mercenary hires are for. Hell, you can even sweeten the deal by offering all those Fighter-related magic items that were secretly a Fighter class feature that was never written down (and thus subsequently forgotten by the WotC designers.)

Wizards don't need Fighters half as much as Fighters need Wizards--because Fighters need their magic items far more than Wizards need theirs, and only one of the two can actually make magic items. I guarantee you that that Fighter you mentioned could not have taken those three extremely dangerous enemies without absolute scads of magic items, all of which came from a Wizard at some point. "I took down three mega-powerful creatures! .....because I was loaded up with power given to me by 8 Wizards" kinda blunts the impact of the achievement, don't you think? I certainly do.


It's statements like these which made me believe you thought 2e was simply superior to all other editions of D&D.

It was the best toolbox edition. One may not be after a tool box though.

Pre 3E plays faster than 3E to 5E. Subjective if you like that or not. Basics easier to DM than AD&D and an ascending AC version is even easier.

Price of that is its very basic. It was very noticeable playing side by side. Same with a clone or OSR game 5.0 following week.

On Sunday a player got +1 Full plate. Running a WotC adventure RAW.

In my other campaign by level 6 most of them have a rare and a few others.

. Wife lacks a rare she's got an amulet of devotion +1, headband of devotion, and a luckstone.

AD&D we used a lot of republished adventures. Still new at D&D back then. Thats why we had so many items. RAW.