Fighter design goals . L&L April 30th

No class should be able to stand in front of the wizard and "absorb the damage of, and throw offthe effects of" an entire wizard's spell arsenal for the day, shrug and then move on to killing the wizard.

Well, there's your problem. The statement just said that the fighter could keep fighting... nowhere in there did it say he'd proceed to lay the beatdown on the wizard and kill him. "Continue fighting" does not equal "Kill the wizard".

You just seem to want to take what was said and expand it out to some illogical extreme, inferring things that aren't actually there unless you have some masochistic desire to think the worst.
 

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To me it doesn't sound like fighter always beats a wizard.

It sounds like what they are saying is that if a wizard unloads his normal selection of prepared spells on a fighter, it wont kill the fighter. Meaning that if a wizard is stacked up with ½ combat spells, and ½ noncombat spells, he can't blow out all the fighters HP without leaving himself open for a easy fighter win.

Or basically if the wizard unloads his best slots for offense, the fighter will still survive and the wizard will have no defense. If the wizard goes mostly defense, he wont make a dent into the fighter's health and STILL be most like kill but it will take longer. But if the wizard spends every spell slot on offensive and defensive combat spell, he has a chance to win.... but now he has no exploration or social spells available.

Now if they could only do that.
 
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Are you looking for an AC that's higher than a rogue of the same level?

One of the reasons I always wish that D&D separated out armor from hard-to-hittedness is that I really want the rogue to be harder to hit and the fighter to be better at resisting damage. As is, it's really hard to maintain that flavor because between the AC and the hit points, it's all very murky as to what's happening.
Why should a rogue be better at anything to do with fighting than the fighting-man?
 

I agree with most of what you're saying, it's very much the 1e approach. Do you think all spells should be risky to cast, or just a few? Iirc most 1e spells didn't have any drawbacks - magic missile for example. And should this also apply to divine spellcasting? There could be something akin to potion miscibility/wand of wonder/deck of many things randomness with potentially very negative consequences whenever any spell is cast. Or perhaps that would slow the game down too much.
Generally, the more powerful and supernatural the effect, the more potential danger for the spell-caster.
I like the idea of spells being more disruptable in combat. Defensive casting or taking a five foot step backwards was too easy in 3e, imo. Maybe if all casting was a full round action.
'Disruptable' spells was part of the balance of magic in AD&D. I heartily endorse a return to this. Wizards need to understand the hazards of venturing too close to a melee and keep followers/henchmen/thralls in their employ to keep foes at bay.
 

Why should a rogue be better at anything to do with fighting than the fighting-man?
The rogue should be the best at ending combat before the other guy knows it's happening. That's it's "balance" in combat.

Even the whirling, flipping, misdirecting, acrobatic swashbuckler should be a multiclass, if they expect to be able to actually stay in combat without an effective meat shield.
 

There's a lot of people in this thread who seem to keep making the mistake of assuming combat is the only balance metric.

Maybe a fighter could win in a straight-up fight with a wizard. This wouldn't be anything particularly new to 5e. Pathfinder, 2e, and 1e wizards also loose in a straight up fight with a fighter (ability to take damage and disrupt spells FTW). About the only way a wizard wins in that scenario is by using some sort of Save-Or-Die effect and getting lucky on the dice (or twinking their spell DC). If they win initiative, and the fighter fails the save, then maybe they come out ahead. If not, they're toast.

The way a wizard beats a fighter isn't in combat. It's in doing things like avoiding combat to begin with (things like Charm or Teleport aren't there to win battles, they're there to prevent them). In a lot of ways, if a wizard gets into a normal fight alone, they've already failed.

That's possible to balance because combat isn't the only measure of character power. I'm not sure how 5e is gonna do it, but a wizard in my mind is "spike potential." That is, a few limited times per day, the wizard is CRAZY effective. The wizard is your panic button. They are your nova. They are your big boom effect that might save the day. Their spells are going to save your bacon. But they can only do it a few times each day, and then they're spent. Maybe Fireball does end an encounter quickly. But the next encounter won't go so quickly. The wizard has used their big boom effect, and there's nothing left of that power.

Fighters in this mode are MasterCard: useful everywhere. Wizards might be more like your specific store credit card: more useful than MasterCard, but only under limited, rare circumstances.

That's not the only way you can do it, that's just the way that matches my expectation of D&D magic the best.
 

This right here! I don't want 4th edition's Mythic fantasy. I didn't like it then and I'm not going to like it in the future.

That should be one of many playstyles that are available, not the default.
Agreed. This is one of the areas where I think tiers were actually a good idea. Swords and Sorcery (Conan) happens in the Heroic tier. Epic/high fantasy (Tolkien) happens in the Paragon tier. Mythic fantasy (Beowulf) happens in the Epic tier.

It's not an exact science, and I don't think you'll find clean transitions. It's a good way to have a rule of thumb, though. I know that I'm unlikely to enjoy a mythic game, unless it's the final stages of an apocalyptic campaign that started at 1st level (i.e. the frosting on a couple years of play). I want to stay in the S&S to lower high fantasy range. I don't have any issue with other groups who want to play Hercules, but I want to be able to separate the play parameters reasonably easily.

I think 4e may have started the creep towards mythic a bit early, but that doesn't invalidate the tier concept.
 



Why should a rogue be better at anything to do with fighting than the fighting-man?

Why should we be allowed to customize our characters? Because there are multiple interpretations, ideas and concepts about what a class should do.
 

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