Crazy thought 'bout Fighters, Wizards, and progressions

[Mattachine]

Like JohnSnow said, above, it's not that I want fighters to be wuxia warriors, or that I want magic-users to be little better than stage magicians.

I want their to be some equal footing in terms of just how legendary/powerful types of characters become.

I guess many others do not want that. For many players, they like that casters, especially wizards, become the most powerful figures in the game. That works in some campaigns, especially ones where their is a lot of intrigue/politics/roleplay outside of combat.

However, the core game is about combat and quests, and if a game continues that way into higher levels, high-powered casters (as in earlier editions) dominate.


I think of some games I have run in 2e and 3e. I had low-level and mid-level campaigns where there were no casters in the party, or maybe just one. They could handle adventures with little difficulty. In the high-level campaigns I ran, I had parties consisting entirely of casters, or 50/50 casters and warriors. Without fighters, the casters seemed freer to blast away (no friendly fire accidents). With fighters they "helped out", but the casters were the determining factor in every important fight.

Heck, in running a 3e version of Return to the Tomb of Horrors, the final battle against Acererak came down to him and sorcerer duking it out with wish spells. The sorcerer had more wishes, and therefore won. Cool stuff! . . . unless you were a player with the barbarian who just went from encounter to encounter waiting for the casters to win.

 

[avin]

Casters should be toned down in 5E.

Classes should be somewhat balanced.

It's not fun to sit down and watch casters press their "I win" buttons and do everything by themselves.

 

[JohnSnow]

A 20th lvl fighter is an expert swordfighter (or whatever). He can carve his way through hordes of less skilled opponents. He's the guy who keeps his sword sheathed, and doesn't drop the gloves unless he needs to. With a glance, he cows lesser characters. They know he's dangerous. They know he has a reputation as the best swordsman in the kingdom.

Tom Cruise in Last of the Samurai. He's confronted by four of five assassins in the street at night. He waits for them to move. When they finally do, his sword comes out and in a blur of motion, heads are rolling on the ground, and all the assassins are killed. And it took seconds. To me, that's a high level fighter.

Sure. That's a high-level fighter - by the standards of a mostly 0-1st level world. In D&D terms, that character is probably 6th-level or so. If you stretch the game out, you can maybe justify him being as high as 10th-level.

While he's certainly impressive by the standards of our world, that character simply doesn't possess world-changing power. He's a capable personal combatant, but that's ALL.

By no means is he a wimp. You definitely don't want to get in an argument with him, unless you're standing at the back of a big army, because you know your relatives will be having a funeral.

Yet.....he's not going to fly. He's not going to punch a dragon on the nose and kill it. But he might climb up it's leg, run across its back, as it thrashes and throws it's body around to get him off.....and with his expert skill, he retains his grip, absorbs the damage it dishes out trying to dislodge him, climbs up the neck, and with his strength and skill, plunges his sword into that dragon's eye, and into the brain, killing it.

Okay, now, we're talking the equivalent of Legolas. Or Beowulf.

And again, we're talking about a fighter that should realistically, in D&D terms, have a level somewhere in the low to mid-teens. In comic book terms, this is about where Captain America and Batman sit. They are as capable as you can really imagine a mortal human to be. In historical/legendary terms, this is also where you place characters like King Arthur, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Alexander the Great.

But the wizards these characters deal with still shouldn't be able to level armies with a single spell. Just like the fighter, their magic should at best let them decimate a small horde. They shouldn't (probably) be able to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye, and while they can create a horde of low-level undead minions, they aren't going to be turning into a dragon.

In other words, 5th-level spells are probably what you want in terms of the high-end of magical power at this level.

Fighters simply lack comparable abilities in most of the forms of fiction where D&D's highest level spells are used. Advancing past what 4e would call the mid-Paragon tier takes decades and fighters simply don't live long enough to gain that kind of power (or it simply can't be done). What that means, if you're realistic about it, is not that a high-level mage is simply "more powerful" than a high-level fighter, but that the phenomenally powerful wizards in fiction are simply much higher level than the fighters.

Yeah, by the standards of most fiction, that high-level fighter looks ridiculous. FINE. Who cares? Just because the fictional archetypes say that it's okay to have 25th-level wizards hanging around with 10th level fighters doesn't mean we have to write the rules of D&D so that we claim that fighter is 20th level.

At least if we're realistic, the level dichotomy would properly represent what 20th-level play comes down to in most editions of D&D - a couple spellcaster heroes and their lower-level henchmen.

 

[chitzk0i]

In 3.5, full-BAB classes had a large advantage over everyone else at high levels. Monster ACs were set so that fighters et. al. would sometimes miss, but that meant 3/4 BAB melee classes like monks, rogues, bards, and fighter/caster multiclass types had to make up the difference somehow. Thus, instead of fighter types being awesome, it meant that other characters just weren't equipped to contribute in the way the designers seemed to intend.

4e is balanced such that the +1 to attack that most fighters get is significant and meaningful across most of the game. If D&DN flattens bonuses even more, then a single extra +1 to hit will awesome and formidable.

 

[hanez]

Crazy idea. Why dont we just strengthen the fighter? Why dont we just make more powerful martial items. Why not be very pro multiple attacks, and powers? Why not have "semi" magical abilties (like spell resistance, and damage resistance).

Seems to me a lot of people would rather tone down the wizard the tone up the fighter. Mundane d&d does not sound to enticing to me.

I think a place D&D reeeallly needs to grow is Weapons. ALl the weapons suck. All the weapons are uninspiring, between d4, and d12? Really thats it? An axe should DO something, so should a whip, and broad sword, when you specialize in a weapon it should work sooo much better and different then when your not specialized. Off the top of my head, axes have a chance to decapitate humanoids and deal double damage to plant based enemies, whips trip, nets slow people down, swords send arms flying around. Ok even I dont like my examples, but I only spent a few seconds thinking about it. The designers should spend more time thinking how to make weapons different, AND how to make weapon specialization INCREDIBLE, not just in damage but it giving you a different additional mechanic, something you get to do just because you specialized in an axe.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

John McClane and Indiana Jones aren't 20th level characters.

...stuff I have no quibble with....

However, Indiana Jones is pretty much 20th level, he rode out the pressure wave of a close by nuclear explosion in a fridge. There are a lot of fortitude saves made there, what with the gamma rays, the temperature and so forth not to mention to half mile flight in the fridge.

 

[Andor]

If D&DN flattens bonuses even more, then a single extra +1 to hit will awesome and formidable.

+1 is 5% of the range of a d20. The only way a +1 will ever be "awesome and formidable" is if the d20 is no longer used to attack. And that ain't gonna happen. Rolling a d20 to hit is more central to what D&D means than killing ugly people and taking their stuff.

Pert of the problem of D&D is that it means different things to different people. Some people think high level D&D means you can afford the good beer in the tavern and can sneer at a village guard (but not a city guard, Conan respected large groups of men with crossbows.) Others think high level D&D means reordering the cosmos and sneering at minor deities.

Late 3e and 4e tended towards the wuxia side of things. I think the pendulum is swinging back now, 5e will probably be more "The Hobbit" than "The Avengers."

And I'm okay with that, if the highest levels of game play still mean you actually need to exert yourself to cross a continent in a hurry, and cannot spit at kings with impunity. If you want high level wizards with reality bending powers, fine but do what all books and movies do and give the high level spells casting times from hours to days.

If I want to play with superheros, I'll play a superhero system.

 

[Khaalis]

I have to agree with JohnSnow about the whole analogy of D&D wizards vs. literary one. The question is will D&D break the cycle of the uber-wizard "I win" end-game mechanics?

We also have to hope that the new version of D&D will have a "Fantasy Style Dial" to deal with dichotomy that Andor mentions above. We need the ability turn the dial from 'grim & gritty' to high wuxia style fantasy and everything in between. As pointed out, D&D is different things to different people and if the game can't cater to more than one of these genre styles, its just going to be the same problems all over again.

 

[the Jester]

Having just occurred to me, this thought is not near and dear to my heart or anything. It is kinda interesting so I thought I'd share.

We've all seen the arguments on Wizard-Fighter balance (or lack thereof) as the game progresses. We've also heard that they are planning to tone down level progressions for things like "to hit" bonuses.

So...what if Fighters (or a small group of fighter-like classes) were the only ones who got increases in BAB (or its 5e equivalent)? I figure that even if the progression was slow, it would be very significant compared to the other classes. Thoughts?

I like this. As long as the math is flat enough it would work fine.

I think the problem with the idea is that wizard is such a broad class (as are they all), and if you makle it so that advancing as a wizard completely prevents you from gaining BAB, that's awfully harsh.

I don't think so- not if fighters advance their attack bonus at a slow rate (maybe at 2nd and then every 4 levels thereafter?).

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't think so- not if fighters advance their attack bonus at a slow rate (maybe at 2nd and then every 4 levels thereafter?).

I think that's true. If the "good" rate is slow enough that the difference between the two isn't completely absurd.