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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5981858" data-attributes="member: 42582">Dunno. I was just responding to your OP:Fast forward to a brush with a flying dragon raining fire from the skies.To me, that sounded like a situation that makes for a squishy fighter. I mean, it's the notorious way to squish a fighter - ranged damage from a target that the fighter can't (or can't easily) attack.I think the answer to that lies in the play experiences of posters. It is extremely easy, in a fantasy game, for magic to get out of hand.An answer to your abstract question would be: if the wizard had no offensive abilities, but was needed to fly the fighter; and the fighter has no superhuman movement abilities, but was needed to kill the dragon; then we would have interdependence of the sort that you are talking about.But I think, in threads like this, people bring to bear their familiarity with D&D, which tells them (i) that wizards in D&D have always had pretty good offensive abilities, and (ii) that the only edition of D&D to really try, in a mathematical sense, to put wizards and fighters on a  par as far as effectiveness is concerned, is being wound back.Hence they wonder: if the wizard can fly, why will s/he be flying the fighter? Why not just fly herself (perhaps while invisible) and then blast the dragon with the appropriate spell attacks?To come at it another way: the method that 4e used to make wizards and fighters interdependent was to give the parallel and complementary roles in combat: the wizard exercises battlefield control at range, but is squishy close up; the fighter exercises battlefield control close up, but has difficutly projecting any power at range. On an assumption that battlefields will be moderately large, with moderately mobile enemies, the wizard and fighter therefore become complementary. Interdependent, even: the wizard can only exercise control at range if the fighter is, at the same time, exercising control close up against those enemies trying to close with and shut down the wizard.Whereas a model that makes the interdepence not parallel but sequential - first the wizard flies the fighter, then the fighter fights the dragon - breaks down as soon as the wizard can fill the next step in the sequence just as well as the fighter can. And given that the next step is generally "Do X", for some value or other of X, and given that, historically in D&D, wizards have been able to do X for nearly any value of X, this risk of breakdown in sequential interdependence seems more than merely hypothetical.So anyway, there's a roundabout response to your OP: effective interdepedence between characters, in a context in which magic has few or no functional limits, needs to be parallel, not sequential. And achieving that probably requires both taking from the classic wizard, and giving to the classic figther.</blockquote>

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