Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5520646" data-attributes="member: 87792">What exactly does the fighter bring to bear?  The ability to swing a sharpened piece of metal really effectively.  That's it.  He doesn't even have the endurance of a cleric; a cleric can heal himself.  The fighter doesn't even bring skills for out of combat - he has fewer skill points than the wizard (assuming prime stats) and the ones he's good at (climb, jump, swim) are the easiest skills in the game to make irrelevant with magic.  His other skills are Handle Animal, Intimidate, and Ride.  It's the worst skill list in the game.  A statement that to me is almost exactly analogous to "Railroad plots are great as long as the PCs willingly stick to the railroad."  I play with a creative group - odd uses for spells, avoidance of combat matters as much as smacking people round the head with your sharpened bit of metal, and a lot of creativity comes into play.  Knock is the goddamn Rogue's job.  The Wizard shouldn't be better at dealing with the important locks than the Rogue.  And shouldn't do it automatically.  Personally I like the 4e approach - with prep time and at a cost the caster can use the Arcana skill on locks rather than thievery. Mind Blank likewise.  That should be a matter of force of will.  Not "have wizard or die".  Yes, wizards can counter scrying - but normally they do it in fiction with displays of brute magical force - the equivalent of throwing up chaff (which sticks out like a sore thumb). A wizard won't cut it.  A cleric on the other hand...  Power is a significant part of balance.  In a game where the DM is bending over backwards to create jobs for each PC rather than e.g. running a sandbox or a pre-published module, yes.  I don't micromanage to create jobs for Aquaman.  I set the PCs with situations based on what the bad guys want and how the PCs handle it is up to them.  Clerics as a problem are actually worse.  They can fight in melee and their magic is almost as strong as wizards.  Druids ("I have class features stronger than your entire class") are worse still.  Wizard is just used as shorthand for spellcaster.  Two words.  Rope trick.  Indeed.  The core problem with 3.X is that if you played a wizard and played as an actually smart wizard within the setting you exposed those problems.  It's like the Masquerade - but a Masquerade which in character you have every incentive to break, with all the pressure not to coming from out of character situations.  I'll buy that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />  Movie or TV series.  And 4e pretty much explicitely runs on Holywood Physics. My house rule for starting to cut wizards back in 3.x involves making the Bard the only primary caster. Because it seems to be a lot closer to mythological and fictional (protagonist) spellcasters than the wizard.</blockquote>

Verification