D&D (2024) Martial vs Caster: Removing the "Magical Dependencies" of high level.

[James Gasik]

also, god DAMN you for sending me down the 1d4chan rabbit hole again. i'm not gonna be out of this until i go to bed tonight.

I do apologize, but you apparently knew the risks.

 

[James Gasik]

It isn't that playing a "martial" can't be fun; my first 5e character was a Battlemaster Fighter and I had a blast playing them for quite awhile. But what started to happen was, by level 7, is that every turn was "man I really want to impose a condition/do something useful to help the group", so I quickly ran out of Superiority Dice, and then had to go through several combats of "I make attack rolls, I deal damage" (I was an archer, before anyone says grab or push, lol) and I started to miss the various Feats my Pathfinder Fighters could get for more options in combat. I switched it up by multiclassing Rogue, and that helped, but I kept seeing fight after fight (I was playing in AL) get completely imploded by casters using spells, something I could only come close to by spamming maneuvers. I remember complaining once about not having more dice to use, and my DM was like "oh man, that would be busted, think of all the damage you'd do".

I gave him the strangest look. "Yeah, a few more d8's a combat would be busted, when you got people using spirit guardians every combat."

"Well, that's a caster, casters do that."

Like, the guy didn't even seem to think anything was wrong! After that, I started playing casters exclusively in 5e, because the options for playing them were just better, because the design of the game seems to think "spellcasting" is one class feature.

I mean look at what the Eldritch Knight gets from their subclass vs. what the Bladesinger gets from theirs. There's a clear design bias here; your caster wants martial abilities? Sure, no problem.

Your martial wants caster abilities? Oh man, I don't know, let's make you a 1/3 caster and restrict what spells you can use.

 

[CreamCloud0]

i think more martials really ought to have their basic options open up, increasing movespeed, gaining natural climb and swim speeds, a vertical leap, yes some of those are signature traits of certain classes but that just would mean they get even bigger increases, the wizard casts spider climb to ascend a rock wall but the rogue, fighter and barbarian can just climb it themselves, the monk ran straight up it not even slowing their pace.

would martials really be broken if they all had access to unlimited use battlemaster maneuvres(either without the battlemaster die boost or maybe just a d4?), even if certain classes only could access certain ones, there's no way being able to trip or shove an enemy with your attacks would begin to rival the power of hypnotic pattern or fireball.

edit: fighting styles ought to be more prevalent too, outside of investing resources with feats and multiclassing only one subclass of one class will ever have more than one fighting style, and they get to have two whole fighting styles! wow! martial classes should really be picking up fighting styles left and right.

 

[Hussar]

Or at the very least, let them scale like cantrip. A d8 bonus damage isn’t really doing anything at 11th+ level.

 

[Remathilis]

And Gandalf wasn't safely conjuring earthquakes on the daily. How many resurrections did we see in Middle Earth? How many wizards and bards and sorcerers and clerics were on the Wall in Westeros.

It is a false comparison to hold these up as anything resembling typical of a D&D setting.

I say if D&D is going to be utterly fantastical with regards to martials in order to match the utterly fantastical things with magic, it should finish and go all in. A utterly fantastical world of akin to Eberron with impossible cities, magical tech, magical artisans and craftsmen, easily available magic items, and gonzo landscapes and geography. Airships and flying continents. Talking animals. The whole nine yards.

D&D is mostly there anyway. Rip the band-aid off and abandon the notion of reality when it comes to the game.

 

[Emberashh]

As said before, it all comes down to picking a genre and actually sticking to it.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Let's just look completely randomly at my DVD shelf:

Trigun - Sci-Fi Space Western
Slayers - Literally a D&D campaign comedy.
Record of Loddoss War - Literally a D&D Drama
Legend of Escaflowne - Magic Fantasy Mecha
A Certain Kind of Magical Index - Contemporary Sci-Fi
My Hero Academia - Superhero. Legit, the best Superhero work of the past decade which remembers the point of superheroes more than the Big Two have since 1993. This coming from someone who has made superheroes their career
Tomo-Chan is a Girl - A High School Slice of Life light Romance
Komi Can't Communicate - High school slice of life centered around a character study on social anxiety.
Spy X Family - a found family spy thriller.

These are not them same.

And I have a limited pallet.

Sailor Moon, Yugioh and Pokemon were my gateway drug to one piece and Kakegurui (most of those can be called urban fantasy) from there I went into weird nsfw stuff and from there I went into most of what you labeled (still have not watched my hero yet but it's on my list) however along the way death note(more urban fantasy) and Vision and Bleach.
I have been told that I need to go back and watch vampire hunter X and Ninja something or other... I have no wish to see Dragonball or one punch both seem okayish but not my thing.
Depending on how you count it the Avatar series and Castlevania one may count.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The idea is. The caster gets spells as class features. The high-tier Martial gets magic items as class features.

They both come across other magic items via adventuring, and being members of the same party, would split any magic items found any way.

The Martial gets the special magic item while leveling, not while adventuring.

Pretty much.

But unless the martial is imbuing the magical items through sheer force of will, then these magic items as class features are still things you find. It doesn't matter if it happens while leveling, because the story is still: "My friend learned how to manipulate reality through skill and hard work. I found a stick that does all that hard work for me."

Maybe. But it is a reallife archetype that a powerful warrior also has a powerful magic item. Compare King Arthur with Excalibur, Perseus with Harpe and other magic items, and so on. The idea is this archetype is class feature for Martials of high tier.

Who cares if it is a real life archetype?

Sure Arthur had Excalibur, and it was a magical blade. Do you know what was special about Lancelot's sword Seure? It belonged to Lancelot. That's it, no magical powers. Gawaine’s sword Galatine? No powers, just Gawaine's sword. Some of the Knights don't even have their weapons mentioned.

The Harpe? I didn't even know it was a thing, and half the references to it mention it was just a sword design, not some sort of legendary weapon. But let's look to Hercules, surely he had magical weapons, right? Nope. He used a metal club, a bow and arrow, a spear. The weapons didn't have to have special powers.

So, for every "I have a cool magical weapn that gives me special powers" you have heroes who WERE the special part of the equation. And I'd prefer that, since, you know, it is more heroic to be the important part of the equation than the "and also" when compared to your magical weapon.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Isn’t the spell thief concept generally about stealing the ability to cast the spell?

I’m talking about stealing the magic so that the caster fails to cast, and then use that magic for rogue stuff.

I am so stealing this idea

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Sure. There are like a million of them.

They weren't strong or fast enough, and they trained until they were. Their technique was not perfected and then it was. They learned a new technique. They gained a deeper understanding of materials/movements/psychology/the flow of time/etc. Their perception sharpened. They learned to perceive new things. Their body matured/metamorphosed/etc.(they physically grew into their strength)

Heroic fantasy is not littered with characters who can do heroic fantastical things. Magic is one justification for how these fantastical things can be accomplished, but it isn't the only one.

batman spent years as 'just a warrior' until he started talking about pressure points now it isn't a go to every time thing but a common thing for him to hit pressure points. it went from something he could not do to something he can.