How is the Wizard vs Warrior Balance Problem Handled in Fantasy Literature?

[pemerton]

RC, I've got in mind a few things. One is, as you note, the XP system. The second is that combat scales automatically with level (BAB, saves, damage to an extent via spells/feats) in a way that skill bonuses don't, meaning that there are two rather mechanically divergent action resolution contexts that the rules (at least from the original 3E DMG, which is the one I know) don't say much about how to integrate.

The third thing, related to the second, is that the skill rules for 3E tend towards the gritty (for example, there's no way to hit the DCs for the quasi-supernatural balance checks in the Epic Handbook without using magical enhancements) whereas the combat rules tend towards the gonzo (eg the classic fighter-who-can-fall-200-feet-without-dying).

I think all of this combines to create a greater likelihood, in 3E than (for example) either 1st ed AD&D or 4e, of a game in which the non-combat skill-oriented aspect of play becomes almost a separate game from the combat part.

And to link this back to the original thread topic - I think this also contributes to the martial-vs-magic problem that some see. Outside of combat, martial/mortal protagonists are stuck with a rather gritty and realism-bound skill system, while spellcasters get a gonzo, no-holds-barred and no-chance-of-failure spell system. And at least as I recall it, most of the advice in the DMG about mid-to-higher level play, as well as from the major designers of the game, is to adjust the game to accomodate those magical abilities (eg don't make the mystery the plot point, but rather the proving of the conclusion) rather than to adjust the game to make room for the gritty skill system.

This is what I mean when I say that the guidelines for encounter- and scenario-design don't support making skill-oriented issues a core part of the game.

A final qualification - at low levels, the points I've made will tend not to show up. The combat and magic is less gonzo, the differentials in skill bonuses won't generally have become so salient (in part because there is less magic and stat bonuses are still a bigger contributor to the overall bonus), and it is therefore probably easier to integrate skill checks into tactical encounter design in a way that makes the XP issue go away somewhat.

Personally, if I wanted to play an E6 style game I'd probably use Runequest, but I can certainly see why some people favour it as an approach to 3E. It's not just the flavour, but it really does avoid some of (what at least I regard as) mechanical problems emerging.

 

[pawsplay]

I think all of this combines to create a greater likelihood, in 3E than (for example) either 1st ed AD&D or 4e, of a game in which the non-combat skill-oriented aspect of play becomes almost a separate game from the combat part.

Disagree. If you want to emphasize skills, you can generate some really preternatural results. You can have Diplomacy enough to charm nearly all NPCs you meet, the ability to Tumble through a half dozen enemies, the ability to Climb a sheer cliff, or the chutzpath to Intimidate an ogre barbarian.

 

[Votan]

Disagree. If you want to emphasize skills, you can generate some really preternatural results. You can have Diplomacy enough to charm nearly all NPCs you meet, the ability to Tumble through a half dozen enemies, the ability to Climb a sheer cliff, or the chutzpath to Intimidate an ogre barbarian.

I see the issue with skills as being the relative gap. It's not a fatal issue but consider the differences in BAB: rogue to fighter (@20th level) there is a 5 point gap in BAB (which might translate into an even larger "to hit" gap depending on a lot of factors). In the same sense, there is a 6 point gap between good and bad saving throws at this level.

There is a 23 point gap between a fully trained skill (e.g. balance) and an untrained skill (assuming equal ability scores, but they can only matter so much even at 20th level).

This has some perverse effects. It's why grease (which requires balance checks) is so generally effective (as, unlike saves, skills do not advance with level). It also means that a skill challenge (for 20th level characters, DC 30 seems about right) for a trained character is automatic failure for an untrained character.

Then there are just the odd skills (diplomacy) where core 3.5E decided not to make the skill check opposed. So if a character can get a +60 in the skill, the one round action to convince hostile opponents that they should be friendly is now possible.

For me, the real issue was induced incompetence. The Fighter might actually be okay at diplomacy relative to a normal person. But she probably cannot meaningfully contribute next to the bard. We don't see this in combat; a 20th level mage can melee a 10th level fighter very successfully (even without extreme design choices). A 20th level fighter can't really compete in diplomacy with a 10th level bard 9again, barring an extreme design choice).

But that isn't a skill specific issue. No fighter can fly (no matter how much they wish to do so) but the ability is hardly exceptional in a 5th level mage.

 

[Raven Crowking]

"Relative to a normal person" is, I agree, an issue. The lack of a clear "normal man" standard in 3e makes it difficult to determine exactly how many ranks are normal, are better than average, are good, represent a field expert, and exceed a field expert.

One should not have to be hyper-competent to be competent.

(My system allows you to choose where you advance your skills, your saves, and weapon skills -- effectively controlling your BAB. It works in part because of a clear "normal man" standard.)


RC

 

[Neonchameleon]

How have you demonstrated that? I see you asserting that, but little actual evidence apart from the hit point thing.

I've demonstrated the skills. Our Barbarian does better.

I've said which feats the fighter gets that the barbarian doesn't. Other than this the barbarian has everything he does.

d20 Modern.

OK. Although I'd say that that's a little on the high side.

Edit: Looking at the D20 Modern SRD, 2d6 is the damage done by a Colt Python, a Glock 20, or a .45. I'd expect age of sail guns to be somewhat less effective. But thanks

Given that he must sing continuously to gain these abilities, that's awfully situational. But duly noted.

1: Perform does not have to be singing. Oratory works really well.
2: Inspire Courage and Inspire Greatness both last for as long as the bard sings and for five rounds after they stop. One battlecry at the start is normally enough for the fight.

I named him in the first place as an example of a fighter.

And then demonstrated that you needed to give up three feats to do it - you only had five to start with.

I wouldn't have named him if I didn't think he fit. I'm not shoehorning him in.

And I'm demonstrating that it's a really bad fit.

I am, however, responding to complaints by others he doesn't qualify because... I'm not sure why.

Because a fighter doesn't have the skill unless you make him a really weak fighter.

He might be what you think a fighter ought to be. But the 3.X design of the fighter screwed up badly and left a lot of ground for the barbarian to take over. Like any sort of burly generalist warrior with a range of skills.

It's certainly not because Rogues are tougher or Barbarians are better sailors.

Although when push comes to shove, barbarians are marginally better sailors.

Blackbeard is a tough guy, probably from an upper class background, who steers a ship, scares the crud out of people, and fights like a demon. That pretty much screams Fighter to me.

To me tough guy who scares the crud out of people and fights like a demon in 3.X says Barbarian. Fighters either need highly complex tricks, weapon mastery, heavy armour, or ice water in their veins and an absurd amount of stamina to justify not being barbarians.

He was not a ninja, nor was he known for entering an animalistic rage.

Who said anything about "animalistic"? You yourself said he fought like a demon - and he certainly took a lot of hits before he went down. Fighting like a demon and bringing an extra level over the training salle is what rage actually does mechanically. (What's scary about 3.X fighters is that they are as unruffled and unflustered as if it was a training salle and can go on like the energiser bunny).

He certainly didn't sing in battle.

CHAAAARRRGGGEEEEE!!!!

All the singing a bard needs to do in battle. And the one war cry will last for five rounds. Although I do agree it is unlikely Blackbeard was a bard.

Rage, particularly at that level, is not super. It gives the barbarian a slight numeric edge for a few rounds,

Where a few = 8 - or twice as long as most fights.

during which they may take a lot of damage, then drops the barbarian's hit points, fatigues him, and leaves him without bonuses equivalent to Weapon Focus and Specialization. I'm not sure, it may edge out W Focus/Spec to a slight degree, on the balance, but if so, not by much.

It doesn't by much. But it doesn't have to by much. It just has to do it.

The barbarian does more damage only if fighting two-handed,

Which is why I said DPR, not damage. Weapon Focus/Specialisation is +1 to hit/+2 to damage. Barbarian Rage gives +4 strength - or +2to hit/+2 to damage. The Barbarian does more DPR not because each hit is harder (it isn't) but because he hits more often.

which in practice is likely to reduce his AC further.

Further than what? Pirates didn't normally use shields. Or did you mean the 2 points of AC lost to raging?

Meanwhile, rage grants no advantages in ranged combat whatsoever, unless you use some kind of throwing weapon.

Which is largely irrelevant - I have no penalties in ranged combat either compared to you so I don't use rage until melee. If we use a shoot-then-melee strategy, the barbarian shoots while not raging and then draws his cutlass and rages. While not raging the barbarian matches the fighter BAB for BAB and feat for feat. Making the difference between them 10hp, DR1, and improved uncanny dodge. Oh, and fast movement. The Barbarian wins (although not by much, granted - but it's a strict win because if you took away those things it would be a perfect mirror-match).

It certainly does jack for crossbows or pistols.

You mean it's exactly like Weapon Focus (Cutlass), Weapon Specialisation (Cutlass), Skill Focus (Profession (Sailor)), Alertness, or Negotiator. The five feats your fighter gets that my barbarian doesn't. I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

What skills do you think are involved in those tasks? The waterways thing I guess is Knowledge (geography), which sadly is not a class skill for the rogue.

I'd use Knowledge (local) for the local waterways and trade routes and knowledge (geography) for the international ones. But even if we use knowledge (geography), the rogue has many many more skill points to use than the fighter. So he can better afford to cross-class something.

Somewhere? Unless your barbarian pirate manages to ambush a foe at melee range, this guy is going to outperform him respectably by most measures.

Once more you are wrong. The Barbarian has the same weapon proficiencies you do, the same ranged feats you do, and is better at taking fire - he has more hit points and a point of DR. In short at range the Barbarian modelled on your fighter is strictly better than your fighter. He is exactly equal to the fighter at dishing out damage with guns and has both more hp and DR (and exactly the same AC unless you want to put your fighter into heavy armour?).

Depending on concept? What do you mean by that phrase?

That a rogue pirate (or a ranger pirate or a bard pirate) does things differently from a barbarian or fighter pirate.

Barbarians and rogues certainly make different pirates, but I fail to see how they are simply better.

Giving up the five feats I listed, the only time your fighter does anything better than my barbarian with the same stats is if the barbarian is for some reason not raging. Which either means a lot of fights in the day (something pirates seldom had) or a fight that's gone on for eight rounds after the barbarian started raging.

The barbarian runs out of juice quickly,

For a value of quickly that is a lot longer than most fights. The Con 16 Barbarian can rage for eight rounds before he gets tired. 42 seconds plus another 6 to discharge both pistols at someone is a lot of concentrated mayhem and longer than most fights will last.

"Depending on concept" seems to mean: "If I think rogue pirates sucking at ABC is okay, that's okay, but it's not okay for fighters to suck at anything."

It's not that the fighters don't suck at some things. It's that as this demonstrates, the barbarian is better than the fighter at being a fighter.

However, Blackbeard is probably still a normal Fighter.

We disagree here.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The lack of a clear "normal man" standard in 3e makes it difficult to determine exactly how many ranks are normal, are better than average, are good, represent a field expert, and exceed a field expert.

The town generation rules help give you a baseline: 99% of the world is a Commoner 1. A Commoner 1 represents a "normal person." A Warrior 1 represents a "trained combatant" (probably the equivalent of militia members). Aristocrats, Experts, and Adepts are trained specialists in more esoteric things, but they're normal people with some specialized training, too.

The XP region of the NPC guidelines in the DMG talks about NPCs gaining XP for the same things PC's do (namely, killing). This mentions that NPCs in dangerous areas might have enough XP to push them up to level 2 or 3, but not really beyond that -- they live pretty safe lives, in comparison to the PC's.

They also mention that the "normal human ability scores" are all 10's and 11's.

So in 3e, the far end of the "normal power curve" is a Level 3 Warrior with a 10 strength. Maybe that's a D&D-equivalent special ops member, or marine, or a well-scarred hireling or henchperson.

The thick end of that power curve, where most of humanity lies, is right there at the bottom, with nearly everyone being a Level 1 Commoner.

Which means a skill bonus maximum of about +5, if they're highly specialized and not interested in a diversity of skills (which would be a little silly for an NPC, but whatever). They can accomplish DC 15 things on a Take 10, which means, as a baseline, that they're capable of doing some basic tasks, and can even have a chance to do some pretty cool things once in a while.

So if a first level PC fighter has a skill bonus of +9 (skill ranks + ability score modifiers + a possible feat), they're already very impressive at what they do. They can accomplish DC 19 things on a Take 10, and in a level or two, DC 20 things.

Most NPC sailors would be Commoner 1 sailors with a Profession (Sailor) bonus of maybe +2. They'd have other skills to round out their point total (such as Perception, or maybe Diplomacy, or anything). If the NPC were especially invested in being a sailor (like, they wanted to be captain, or at least first mate), they might dump all their points into it and be +5, best sailor on the ship. A PC fighter who got a +2 bonus in Profession (Sailor), even just from a Wisdom bonus rolling untrained, would be as competent a sailor as most other crew members, and so could reasonably be a Pirate Captain. If they wanted to also be the best sailor on board (certainly not required for a dude in charge), they would want to bump it up to +5 or so.

I don't know where they would find Full Plate Armor and Exotic Weapons that were rust-proof and buoyant on the high seas, though, so I'm not sure why any character who wanted to spend their life there would be a Fighter. Better as a Ranger (Hook's croc as an animal companion!), or a Barbarian (drunken rage!) or a Rogue (skullduggery!), or even a Swashbuckler (aha!), Marshal (a great leader!), Scout (for darting about the ship), Hexblade (a cursed pirate!), or Warblade (a daring fighter!). But that's really a quibble. Anyone can be a Pirate Captain in D&D without too much effort. The bar for entry is really low. It is set for Commoners.

That remains true with most other things you can imagine. Even the strongest and wisest kings in the world, who have scored constant victories over the enemy in armed conflict, are probably only 3rd level Aristocrats. A first level Paladin can rival their Diplomacy. Not that a PC is likely to pick up Skill Focus (diplomacy), but y'never know. "Blackbeard" might be modeled as an Aristocrat 1/Warrior 2. That's enough to "fight like a demon" in comparison to a Commoner 1 (which is what most sailors are).

The rub is that Fighters and Paladins and Rangers and Rogues and all those other PC-classed characters are rare. They're rare because those classes represent fantasy heroes (and villains and rivals and other Narratively Significant People) and not normal folk.

Of course, even a 20th level Marshal/Dread Pirate has problems, given that while he is likely the person with the highest Profession(Sailor) rank in the world, he could still roll a 1 on his check, while his friend the Wizard can just Control Weather for the storm to stop instead of needing to roll a skill check to get past it.

I'd like the best sailor in the world to be able to bypass a storm as easily as that, honestly, but D&D's divide between Spellscaster and Warrior stops me short, since it says "No, only Wizards get to automagically make stuff happen, your best bet, if you want to be a great pirate king, is to be friends with a wizard who can help you do things like sail."

 

[NoWayJose]

I tend to feel that when I can't easily make a noble wizard or a pirate PC, the game is starting to fail as a game of generic fantasy adventuring. These aren't really alternatives to being an adventurer. They're certainly not in the same boat as basket-weaving.

The cause of this particular issue seems fairly easy to diagnose, however - the 3E skill rules, both the cross-class rules and the skill point rules. I gather that Pathfinder tackles both of these, and it seems to me for a very obvious reason.

A further complication is that 3E doesn't provide any obvious mechanical route, in its encounter design guidelines, XP rules etc for making some of these skill-oriented issues a core part of the game.

I have never played a D&D game in my life in which 1st level PCs were pirates (or basket weavers or any other professional) and were required to mechanically and optimally simulate an average week or month in the life of that career as part of the adventure.

I must also assume that 99% of 4E campaigns have never begun with 1st level pirate PCs required to accurately simulate an average week or month in the life of that career as part of the adventure.

I assume all this because a 1st level 3E or 4E D&D adventure module is almost inevitably about dungeon crawls. This is a sad fact that I am resigned to. Therefore, I don't understand the fixation on becoming the optimized fighter pirate at 1st level. I have no expectations of D&D to do model this, because adventures never or rarely bring this into play. (and if they do, there's some ad hoc mini-rules for it).

In 3E and 4E, PCs ARE primarily adventurers and professional backgrounds tend to be just back-story. That's just how the mechanics work (compared to something like Call of Cthulu where the chosen profession strongly influences your stats).

 

[NoWayJose]

I tend to feel that when I can't easily make a noble wizard or a pirate PC, the game is starting to fail as a game of generic fantasy adventuring.

I'm still perplexed by this. Some people are faulting 3E for not giving fighters the skill points they need to be as good a pirate as the player imagines the PC should be.

I have a parallel problem. I fault 4E for not giving wizards the powers they need to be as versatile a spellcaster as I imagine the PC should be.

Whether or not it's true that fighters can be optimal pirate PCs is an *unintentional* side-effect or artifact of 3E mechanics, and (as I've argued above) is largely irrelevant to most D&D adventures.

Conversely, the 4E wizard rebalanced to be nothing more than a push-and-pull combat controller is an *intentional* product of the 4E paradigm, and the consequences are far more extensive.

In context of the OP, I give 3E points for at least *trying* to emulate wizards and warriors in fantasy literature, and I give 4E zero points (or negative points) for allowing the metagame to overwhelmingly dictate what wizards can do despite the fantasy literature.

IMO, the sweet spot for addressing the wizard vs warrior balance (in terms of balancing metagame requirements vs fantasy literature possibilities) lies within the void between 3E and 4E, for neither 3E nor 4E gets it completely right.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I have a parallel problem. I fault 4E for not giving wizards the powers they need to be as versatile a spellcaster as I imagine the PC should be.

Whether or not it's true that fighters can be optimal pirate PCs is an *unintentional* side-effect or artifact of 3E mechanics, and (as I've argued above) is largely irrelevant to most D&D adventures.

Conversely, the 4E wizard rebalanced to be nothing more than a push-and-pull combat controller is an *intentional* product of the 4E paradigm, and the consequences are far more extensive.

In context of the OP, I give 3E points for at least *trying* to emulate wizards and warriors in fantasy literature, and I give 4E zero points (or negative points) for allowing the metagame to overwhelmingly dictate what wizards can do despite the fantasy literature.

This is what one of the other posters in this thread was talking about when they said others were making this into an Edition War. It seems to be the pro-3.x crowd dragging 4e into this, not the people discussing the 3e fighter. Most of the commentary levelled at the 3.x fighter is just trying to point out why they think the class is inadequate, not that "4e does it better and you should all switch."

That seems to be the giant chip on the shoulder of some folks here though.

Granted, about 40 pages ago, a pro-4e stance like this was taken, but that was 40 pages ago, no longer relevant to the discussion at hand.

Most of the current discussion has centred completely around what other 3.x options make better fighters than fighters, or what "needs" to be done to improve them to a basic level of competence. So why bring 4e into it now?

Other than to slam an edition you don't like, that is. Or to start an Edition War.

 

[NoWayJose]

Most of the current discussion has centred completely around what other 3.x options make better fighters than fighters, or what "needs" to be done to improve them to a basic level of competence. So why bring 4e into it now?

Basically, to put things into perspective.

Accusing the fighter of basic incompetence (a premise which many people here disagree with, BTW) might seem reasonable until contrasted with a more relevant and prevalent factor. I believe the obsession over piracy is nitpicking and, as they say, mental masturbation, relatively speaking to the average D&D campaign and to the larger question of the OP.

Furthermore, my post was completely on-topic to the OP (and thus this entire thread) and I am permitted to change the subject to something I feel is more relevant. I believe it should be obvious to you that not everyone is somehow ethically obligated to remain fixated on the exact discussion at hand until given permission otherwise.

Other than to slam an edition you don't like, that is. Or to start an Edition War.

Well, I think your interpretation is rather unfair, to be honest.

If I wanted to start an edition war, why did I specificaly state that "neither 3E nor 4E gets it completely right" -- and why did you exclude it from the quote in your post?