D&D 5E (2024) DMG 5.5 - the return of bespoke magical items?

[CreamCloud0]

I think there is a fantasy trope where at some point a wizard has to exceed in innate power a fighter. A man with a sword can only go so far and if you bring magic down to that level you make magic boring and if you bring martial prowess up to magical levels you make it wuxia.

is there an issue with making martials wuxai or is that just a matter of personal taste and preference?

i think an issue arose with casters when they stopped getting designed to be half as squishy as they used to be, a caster used to be powerful, but they were also fragile as hell and their magic was easily interrupted, there was a trade off, but now they can take their lumps pretty well, sometimes better than the martials themselves! and still cast their magic too afterwards without a hitch.

 

[Nefermandias]

I felt that in my very soul, but it was a valuable lesson.

I hope the lesson was "Just run the game normally and trust in the power of emergent storytelling."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it's Luke Crane who described game design as mind control.

I would not use such strong terms myself (but that's, in part, because I have some pretty strong hangups about the morality of controlling another's mind.)

But I would certainly agree that it is about capturing and landscaping a portion of the plane of meaning.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think there is a fantasy trope where at some point a wizard has to exceed in innate power a fighter. A man with a sword can only go so far and if you bring magic down to that level you make magic boring and if you bring martial prowess up to magical levels you make it wuxia. So as a goal, I don't consider it a good one for games I'd like to actually play. Some of this imbalance is handled by magic items, domains, etc... but it's not an imbalance I even care about honestly.

Traditionally D&D has had fighters dominate powerful at low levels. They were about equal at mid-levels. They fell behind at the highest levels. But fighters have always been useful even at high levels. Some classes not so much but the fighter has always been a bulwark of any group and fun to play at any level. I would have made the thief a subclass of fighter in earlier editions. Their skill package is just a different one from the rangers.

That it is a trope does not mean we need to follow it. "X is a trope" simply means it's been done repeatedly. Tropes are tools; we should not use an oven to make a garden salad, no matter how prevalent and useful ovens are.

D&D, as a game, has proffered an experience of peers adventuring together. Not merely people who remain useful to you even when you become powerful, but genuinely comrades (if not necessarily friends) standing together on a heroic journey, whether that be Greco-Roman heroism or the modern (Christianized) heroism of selfless good-deed-doing.

If the game is giving us signal after signal that it is for peers adventuring together--that the party members are, in some sense, equal participants, and that the players are equal contributors--then it behooves the game to actually be designed to match that.

I think it is perfectly possible to design a game where martial characters are peers of magic-users. That does, I admit, require that we not allow magic-users to reach the same maximum height that magic-users can potentially reach in fiction, because "can potentially reach in fiction" would mean literally godly, not just godlike, power. I further admit that it requires that we take a relatively expansive attitude toward what is possible for the martial characters.

Neither of those things is unverisimilitudinous in its own right--except in the fact that magic is precisely as unreal as crazy martial derring-do. The spellcaster is necessarily a dweller in the fully supernatural. Nothing about verisimilitude, or setting consistency, or anything else, forbids us from putting martial characters in the transmundane, where they are not strictly supernatural, but are no longer limited in all the ways that the utterly mundane are.

And the warrior who resists supernatural forces with nothing but grit and skill and still triumphs? That, too, is a trope. Hell, Conan exemplifies it!

 

[Micah Sweet]

is there an issue with making martials wuxai or is that just a matter of personal taste and preference?

i think an issue arose with casters when they stopped getting designed to be half as squishy as they used to be, a caster used to be powerful, but they were also fragile as hell and their magic was easily interrupted, there was a trade off, but now they can take their lumps pretty well, sometimes better than the martials themselves! and still cast their magic too afterwards without a hitch.

Since many players don't want wuxia martials, ideally both ways of representation should be included.

 

[Emerikol]

is there an issue with making martials wuxai or is that just a matter of personal taste and preference?

For me it is taste and mechanics that dissociate. (e.g. plot coupons).

i think an issue arose with casters when they stopped getting designed to be half as squishy as they used to be, a caster used to be powerful, but they were also fragile as hell and their magic was easily interrupted, there was a trade off, but now they can take their lumps pretty well, sometimes better than the martials themselves! and still cast their magic too afterwards without a hitch.

At lower levels and perhaps into mid-level I agree. They were always hard to kill at higher levels. I agree though that WOTC has made them far more formidable at lower levels. I like magic being a start weak and grow strong type of power.

 

[tetrasodium]

is there an issue with making martials wuxai or is that just a matter of personal taste and preference?

i think an issue arose with casters when they stopped getting designed to be half as squishy as they used to be, a caster used to be powerful, but they were also fragile as hell and their magic was easily interrupted, there was a trade off, but now they can take their lumps pretty well, sometimes better than the martials themselves! and still cast their magic too afterwards without a hitch.

Yes there is an issue with making martials wuxia/xianxia/cultivation☆ in d&d without somehow converting the setting over and changing an awful lot of expectations. A lot of the tropes those cultivation genre characters depend on are either jarringly out of place, completely unsupported by 5e, or come off looking toxic when not expected. Have you read much of that genre? Those characters simply don't fit into other settings any more than Harry Dresden Kate Daniels or locutus of borg can seamlessly be slotted into the avalanche of hreartwarming hallmark made for tv movies we can expect to see in the coming months about a city dweller & backwater rural country type finding their soulmate after crossing paths in a folksy coffee shop.

While there are a lot of critical differences that keep those characters in check within their own settings, a couple of the easiest & most dramatically different elements to describe are things like tribulations/heaven's wrath & how there's always someone (wayyyyyy) tougher. TTRPGs have their own spin on stuff like "lightning strikes/rocks fall you've angered the GM" or the very old"you must fight to the death against another [whatever] to advance in this class after level X" & it's usually not viewed positively when leaned on heavily or brought back, but in those genres it's such a common & well used trope that the in world characters respect and expect to face tribulations & heaven's wrath with regularity. Bleach makes for a good example of how always someone tougher plays out since it happens so early & frequently throughout the series where the main characters seem to reach a new plateau of world-shaking power dealing with the last bbeg only to be casually humbled & crushed into the dirt by someone who doesn't even view them as worth getting serious to accomplish that. Then you have the various mystic pills/rituals/etc needed to advance or use some of their more extreme powers (ie just like spellcasters often face). All of those are important to keep those characters in check & bottleneck problem types who would become horrible genocidal war criminals & world reshaping level tropes like the common presence of beast tides, [monster filled] pocket worlds & so on needed to fuel them haven't even come up... If you thought murderhobos treat "commoners" poorly, the plight of mortals existing near cultivators from those genres makes "commoner" seem like a step up to envy & strive for.

Some of those tropes would be useful to be represented in player facing optional sidebars, but being player facing is important in allowing the player & character to recognize them without the GM needing to explain it in the heat of the moment. It says a lot how the folks calling for just making martials like their wuxia counterparts never bring up including the stuff that supports & keeps those wuxia martials in check in the process of doing so.

☆ Basically the same thing but one word is japanese another chinese & the one english. There are some important differences, but generally interchangeable for purposes of this discussion. Sticking with the term cultivation over the other two is good because it splits off the various faith based elements or corrupts them into something as generic & decorative as the average anime "priest/sister" who happens to be dressed like the catholic version.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Yes there is an issue with making martials wuxia/xianxia/cultivation☆ in d&d without somehow converting the setting over and changing an awful lot of expectations. A lot of the tropes those cultivation genre characters depend on are either jarringly out of place, completely unsupported by 5e, or come off looking toxic when not expected. Have you read much of that genre? Those characters simply don't fit into other settings any more than Harry Dresden Kate Daniels or locutus of borg can seamlessly be slotted into the avalanche of hreartwarming hallmark made for tv movies we can expect to see in the coming months about a city dweller & backwater rural country type finding their soulmate after crossing paths in a folksy coffee shop.

ah, i may have had a slightly different idea on what the term meant than to what it actually did, or at least happening at a smaller scale, mostly i just thought that it referred to running up walls and making 'wire fu' floaty jumps from training, those kind of preternatural physical abilities that seem right at home in a high fantasy setting.

 

[tetrasodium]

ah, i may have had a slightly different idea on what the term meant than to what it actually did, or at least happening at a smaller scale, mostly i just thought that it referred to running up walls and making 'wire fu' floaty jumps from training, those kind of preternatural physical abilities that seem right at home in a high fantasy setting.

They wouldn't be any more out of place or noteworthy enough to need an explainer justifying them in those three genres than a fireball or lightning bolt getting thrown around in your average fantasy, but they also tend to be so overused that it's pretty common to not see them at all because it's only impressive for purposes of reducing animation & special effect/stunt budgets .

It's maybe even more common for characters to fly on swords or take a carriage/boat/maybe even train to travel long distances between

☆ i.e.Not much different from flying on a broom or something but super common since it doesn't require "mortals" to be capable of making that journey & large unimportant quantum distances of tens/hundreds/thousands/etc of miles hours days or whatever can be cited while getting immediately dismissed

 

[James Gasik]

I hope the lesson was "Just run the game normally and trust in the power of emergent storytelling."

No, it was more "what a player values is not going to be the thing you think they should value".

Now this is anecdotal and only my experience, so it may not apply to others, but most players value straightforward jumps in power over ones they have to jump through hoops for (even if the end result is better) or utility.

You might think "ah, the Fighter is great and melee and struggles with ranged combat" and have them find, say, a magic throwing axe that always returns to their hand. Don't be surprised if they instead go "eh, it's ok, but I'd rather have a two-handed sword that does an extra 2d6 fire damage!".