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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5498143" data-attributes="member: 2067">There are ways to model combat experience that don't make you a fantasy hero. These things are explicitly for NPC's, since PC's are assumed to be fantasy heroes. Things like the Commoner and the Warrior were invented and given levels -- to reflect the continuum between someone mostly untrained (Commoner 1) and someone with some pretty extensive actual training (Warrior 3).Or, in 4e terms, the difference between an unstatted NPC, a Level 1 Minion and a Level 3 Standard (or even Elite or Solo). But Real Life military training is not analogous or useful, since Real Life doesn't involve dragons or +1 swords or wizards. We've already clearly made the case that fantasy heroes are not Real People. Israeli citizens don't exist in D&D terms, no wealthy lunatic can be Batman, Hitler doesn't get an alignment, and marines don't get levels in anything because the real world doesn't work like that. This is about the heroic fantasy genre, and how best to evoke the feel of heroic fantasy. Batman and James Bond and Conan the Barbarian and Odysseus and Achilles and Hercules and a level 1 D&D fighter are all better than Real People, because that evokes the feel of heroic fantasy, that is part of what heroic fantasy is about: being better than Real People. This was never meant in a literal absolute sense, as far as I can tell. It was meant in the sense of "When I play D&D, I expect this to be the case." The argument is not frickin' exegetical. This is not an extensively researched pissing contest where we measure who is right by the amount of rules they can cite. This is people talking casually about something they are kind of passionate about, and what they would like to see.I'd like to see warriors and wizards on par like they are in fantasy narratives, which is the genre D&D also works in.That has nothing to do with Israeli military training or specific NPC's in old adventures, as far as I can tell.You're mixing your tenses. If you're playing that specific 1e module, perhaps not. OR, perhaps that particular 1e module's offhand reference is wrong. Or maybe you ignore it because you think irrelevant or stupid anyway. You can't extrapolate from a limited example like that, or even if you had 100 examples, because the facts don't matter, people's expectations do.Perhaps that was part of the problem, after all: that fighters were like commoners, and wizards were not. These useless citations don't tell us what we should do going forward. If we want a game that reflects heroic fantasy, we should do away with laborers with fighter levels oh look we already did that, guess that problem is solved.If you want to play a game where every laborer is a trained combatant, every hero the equal of a laborer, I don't understand what you're gaining. I don't know what would be appealing about that, if you want to play a game of heroic fantasy. It sounds more like a game of "Laborers & Militia Members." Which is valid, but not what I imagine D&D to be.Those rules are not divinely inspired writ. They can be wrong, mistaken, dumb, weird, awkward, and unhelpful. Such as by giving peasants fighter levels, or using fighter levels to model Normal People combat ability. But he wasn't a gardner in the Real World.And he was always heroic. To not be affected by the One Ring? That is a level of power unmatched by any other character in that world. And he was basically born that way. Samwise is above and beyond, unique and exceptional, specially, significantly powerful. He couldn't slay a dragon or rule an empire or kill superman, but, then, LotR's heroism was of a different flavor than D&D's, Conan's, or Batman's. That is both because he is a fantasy hero, and why he is a fantasy hero.Jeanne is hardly a classic hero. For one, she is an Actual Person who is considered to have done miraculous things in the name of an Actual God with Actual Miracle Powers. Actually. This is not Batman or Samwise at all. This is not fantasy fiction. This is History and Religion of the Real World.If you're considering Batman and Jeanne D'Arc on the same continuum, the problems here are more deeply fundamental. Conflating the two is possibly even insulting, depending on one's personal faith and calibration. You could still, of course, play a character inspired by Jeanne D'Arc. In your backstory, you were a farmgirl, then you said "Yes, God" and became a Paladin, and now you and your Celestial Warhorse ride around saving France from dragons and goblins and demons and devils and the like while healing disease with a touch. Maybe your military victories are part of your backstory, maybe they are still to come, but you're killing monsters, so there's that.This would pretty much be how you'd play any character inspired by some actual historical figure.George Washington is a Chaotic Good barbarian/warlord with a Con of 20.He was none of these things in real life, since in real life, he wasn't a fantasy hero, no matter how awesome I think he is.</blockquote>

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