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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6069483" data-attributes="member: 87792">When the great big things don't?  Two powers out of over a hundred here and not ones any fighter is obliged to take.And [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION], I think one of the major points you are missing is that what a fighter does in combat is much, much more complex and variable than what a wizard does in combat.Let's take two situations and put a wizard and a fighter through each.Situation 1: One Ogre with a club.Situation 2: Three Goblins.What the wizard does is almost exactly the same.  To use one example, he points and a small pea like bead of energy darts out from his fingertip , lands where he wants it, and explodes.  Fireball or scorching burst? You decide - but either way the only difference between the use of the spells in the two situtions is what the wizard points at.Now we look at the orthodox sword and board fighter.  Against the ogre, the fighter raises his shield to about head height to protect against the lines the ogre would be attacking with the club, and puts his sword at the level of the ogre's gut - it's easy, it's unarmoured, and it doesn't even have a rib cage.  Our fighter then leads with the edge of the shield squarely at the ogre's face, putting the ogre on the back foot and denying any room for the ogre to swing a club because there's half a shield in the way.  With the ogre occupied by the shield's edge (this, incidently, is orthodox viking style sword and board), the fighter's sword comes in low for the ogre's gut.  Ogre takes damage and is reeling backwards.Against the goblins, that would be instant suicide.  Raising your shield to the level of your head and your sword over the level of the goblin's head?  Slippery little bastards just run under your defences and hamstring you.  Instead you drop into a crouch, shieldboss at the height of a goblin's head, and point of your sword level with their breastbones, flicking between them as you try circling to prevent them flanking you.  They've spread out, so you pick a moment and rush at one of them.  Your chosen goblin will dodge or parry if you go point first so you don't.  You go shield first, using the flat of the shield as something large enough and powerful enough (with your armoured form behind it) that our goblin can't (we hope) get out of the way.  You use bulk and muscle to drive the goblin back, out of any sort of formation and off balance - and then you use your superior reach to reach round the shield and stab downwards using the shield boss to guide your blade before turning, hoping you were fast enough to catch the goblin's mates on the hop.Two completely different approaches for two completely different foes - neither of which would have worked at all on the other one.  And the kicker?  Both those attacks were Tide of Iron.  What the fighter does is incredibly situational when you break it down to the nuts and bolts - and the powers represent approaches.  If the fighter uses only six moves (and that's being generous to a 3.X fighter if you read it as a type of attack is a specific move) then any smart enemies would just learn to counter those six moves (it's not hard; there are only six of them and all cookie cutter).  In actual fact any fighter worth having that maps to the real world will have dozens of moves and variations which do a wide range of things, and they will train many of them to be instinctual.  But you can group them together (seriously, do you want your fighter to have first form nikkyo, second form nikkyo, third form nikkyo, etc. all as separate techniques?) - and the smart way to group them is into a range of effects.The outcome for almost any fighter power is plausible (don't mention CAGI here please).  The input is sensible.  The fighter in question probably knows eight ways to get that effect, only some of which apply in any given situation.  If you want to know how a fighter is doing what they do, pick up a historical fencing manual.  Better yet pick up three from different cultures.  A power structure allows fighters toi be flexible fighters who see and take opportunities that others would miss rather than repetative robots - and your wizard doesn't even know the right questions to ask.  Also if a fighter's moves mostly take six seconds that fighter is dead.  The power covers most of what the fighter does in six seconds - which a sane fighter certainly doesn't do in nice six second chunks.It's about seeing opportunities as much as it is deciding in advance "I will do this."  The fact that without some sort of power structure there is no real need to spot opportunities makes the fighter not like any real fighter.  And the example wizard an ignorant kibbitzer who's so impressed by his own big flashy spells he doesn't understand what he's watching.</blockquote>

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