Crazy thought 'bout Fighters, Wizards, and progressions

[Ratskinner]

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.

I personally don't have a problem toning down spellpower, at least in the basic/core game at low-mid level. I'd also be perfectly happy if there was a module for the folks who like crazy-powerful magic. Its just that none of that has anything to do with the reason I started this thread.

 

[Andor]

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?

It depends on the scaling/growth rate. In 3e frex the slow progression is 1/2 the good progression for BAB.

At 10th level a Fighter has a +5 point bab advantage over the wizard. On practice it's probably better due to stat placement and feats.

The corner case perfect monster ac to show up the wizard then is 25. (Ignoring stats, feats and items.) So the wizard needs a 20 to hit, but the fighter can connect on a 15. The Fighter has 25% chance to hit, 5 times the wizards chance.

That seems like a pretty strong advantage. (Although it ignores the fact that the Wizard rarely needs to roll to hit.)

So would a non-progressing wizard BAB seem reasonable if the fighter was capping at a +5? Sure. Although if BAB is important to the wizard then dipping into fighter will seem very attractive, depending on the design of the class and the multi-classing system.

Of course if you still have attack bonuses to hit based on stats (which every edition has had) then they become even more significant as class and level based bonuses diminish.

There might be ways around this, for example by capping stat based bonuses at the class/level bonus (It doesn't matter how strong the Mage is if he doesn't know how to throw a blow) or in some related proportion. (Stat bonus is capped at lvl/5 say.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

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.

Why we aren't suggesting that is because it wouldn't be enough. All the spell resistance in the world won't do you any good if the wizard can simply cast 'summon bigger fish' and squash you. I've jokingly said in the past that if you were to give all 3.X fighters at level 13 the ability to kill any spellcaster in 30' as a standard action with no roll required, it wouldn't be enough. That's because all it would do would be to turn the game into a game where the first hit kills. And wizards have so many options to get the first hit in (see: Scry and Fry) that the fighters would be in trouble.

 

[Andor]

Why we aren't suggesting that is because it wouldn't be enough. All the spell resistance in the world won't do you any good if the wizard can simply cast 'summon bigger fish' and squash you. I've jokingly said in the past that if you were to give all 3.X fighters at level 13 the ability to kill any spellcaster in 30' as a standard action with no roll required, it wouldn't be enough. That's because all it would do would be to turn the game into a game where the first hit kills. And wizards have so many options to get the first hit in (see: Scry and Fry) that the fighters would be in trouble.

Heh. For a brilliant example of this watch "Lodoss Wars." The forces of good and evil meet for a climactic battle to decide the fate of the continent. One side triumphs! Victory! *BOOM* Winning King gets struck dead by a witch from 1000 miles away becuase she prefers 'balance' to one side getting too strong. Skyfire sucks.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I like the OP's idea. Fighters need an edge, but I really want it to be mundane. Mages bending reality doesn't bother me because they're mages. That's what they do. Fighters don't have any setting or genre justification to break reality, at least for classic fantasy. Wuxia heroes do that kind of stuff, but I want a Western fantasy game, not Wuxia. I'm far more willing to put up with a power imbalance than I am to sacrifice this aesthetic.

Something that really helped equalize things in my AD&D game back in the day was spell interruption. We used a modified initiative system where there were 20 segments in a round, and everyone rolled a d10 for when their first action was. Casters declared their cast on their initiative but the spell didn't go off 'til a later tick, according to casting time. If they got hit while casting the spell was lost. A lot of fights hinged on protecting the casters so they could get their big strikes off. This made the martial characters more important because if the PC archer could get off a shot at an NPC caster at the right moment he could decide the fight right there.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I like the OP's idea. Fighters need an edge, but I really want it to be mundane. Mages bending reality doesn't bother me because they're mages. That's what they do. Fighters don't have any setting or genre justification to break reality, at least for classic fantasy. Wuxia heroes do that kind of stuff, but I want a Western fantasy game, not Wuxia. I'm far more willing to put up with a power imbalance than I am to sacrifice this aesthetic.

If you want Western fantasy, you're going to have to do something. Take the classic wizard out behind the woodshed and shoot him. (Sure, one can be an NPC). Replace with someone more like the Bard - and then redefine the cleric's casting from that baseline.

Gandalf cast maybe half a dozen spells in the whole of Lord of the Rings, and drew his sword to fight the Balrog. This doesn't look like a fantasy wizard. Merlin quite literally was a bard. And the Western fantasy wizard is more about being a loremaster than flashy spells. If you want to take the wuxia fighter out (and you've just lost Celtic myth by doing so), you need to get rid of Angel Summoner except as a BBEG adversary.

 

[Andor]

I like the OP's idea. Fighters need an edge, but I really want it to be mundane. Mages bending reality doesn't bother me because they're mages. That's what they do. Fighters don't have any setting or genre justification to break reality, at least for classic fantasy. Wuxia heroes do that kind of stuff, but I want a Western fantasy game, not Wuxia. I'm far more willing to put up with a power imbalance than I am to sacrifice this aesthetic.

Well that kind of depends how far back you go in western fantasy. Beowulf swan across a fjord in chainmail with a broadsword in his teeth and ripped off a trolls arm with his bare hands. Even the secret love child of Chuck Norris and Vladimir Putin would have trouble replicating those feats.

And it does kind of bring up a point of cognitive dissonance in design. D&D is almost always set in polytheistic worlds, but it's design is dominated by a mindset informed by a monotheistic worldview.

What the hell am I talking about?

In the creation myths of western monotheism God and man are utterly seperate. God created man from dirt and breathed life into him. In most pagan/polytheistic myths the gods usually create mankind from their own blood or lost body parts, or the left over bits of the same primal dragon that they created themselves and the world from, or men are the literal children of gods.

In other words the difference between Gods and Mortals is one of degree, not kind. And great enough heros could ascend that scale and take their place amoung the gods.

Now the BECMI edition did actually allow this to inform the design, and so did 4e with it's epic destinies some of which were the literal ascension to godhood.

So, from our perspective, there is no such thing as a mundane person in these worlds. Merely low level people who have not awakened to their own power, and higher level ones who are coming into the full power of their legacy.

Now, would it pass the "Is it still D&D" test if 5e made it explicit that when you level up you are awakening your divine nature? For most people I think that's a no, inspite of the BECMI/4e heritage of the notion. But if you can find a way to phrase it so that it doesn't fail the sniff test, this perspective is a great way to allow the design of fighter classes that hold their own against the more flashy mage classes.

 

[Mattachine]

Western fighters that bend reality: Achilles, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, St. George.

It happens.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Western fighters that bend reality: Achilles, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, St. George.

It happens.

Or Orlando and Rodomonte from the knightly romances.

 

[Nebulous]

arg. this is a tough topic. I don't think Wizards should be able to replicate the abilities of other classes, such as becoming a better fighter, or picking locks better than a thief, unless it is some really high level spell with morphable criteria (shapechange into a dragon? Sure, you're the fighter now!) But still, there MUST be some checks and balances in place that really makes a player think first. And i don't mean necessarily a gold piece exchange, that is just metagame. Losing permanent (or even temporary) character attributes is much more likely to make someone think twice before resurrecting three people in one day.

Older editions also had segment casting, which made higher level spells more likely to come at the end of he end of a round, and monsters could hit and disrupt it.