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

[Chaosmancer]

It's less unlocking and more the difference between a sword maker and sword user.

The martials are the only ones skilled in swordsmanship to wield magic swords. The "Special Technique" is a thousands year old trope.

A wizard can't slash a hole into the Feywild. A fighter can.
"You can't cut right into reality!"
It's a magic sword.

I mean D&D fighters take fireballs and dodge them without moving. Wouldn't a logical explanation be them batting away half the fighter with their magic axe?

I'll never forget the episode of Slayers where Gourry is mind controlled and uses the Sword of Light vs his magic user friends to parry and reflect all their spells back at them and AOE them into full panic mode. So they had to me saved by another high level fighter who could enter melee with him..

Because Gourry is a high level fighter and he has a magic sword. And a pea size brain.

Okay, question. Why does it have to be a magical weapon?

I mean, in theory that entire fight, as bad-ass as it was, would have ended instantly if it wasn't The Sword of Light and was just... a sword. It would be like saying "look how bad-ass this fighter is, with his armor of immunity to all magic, he can't be taken out by mere magic-users, you need a bad-ass fighter to take him out" Like... are we really going to pretend the quality of the swordsman matters there?

And sure, they say that he is drawing out the sword's full power yadda yadda yadda, but the trick is in the phrasing. It is the SWORD'S power, not HIS power. What is Docter Strange without the Eye of Agamoto? Still the flippin' sorcerer supreme.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The funny thing is is that despite all the canned claims about high level magic being all reality warping and what have you, high level magic isn't actually capable of all that much.

Wish is an exception, but that shouldn't even be a spell to begin with. And meanwhile all the rest can be flashy, but hardly reality warping, especially relative to a world where magic is commonplace. Like sure you can call down a Meteor Storm or conjure a tiny pocket dimension, but whoopdidoo. Itd take weeks for Storm to do the same amount of damage one could do with a barn, an oil lamp, and a cow. Calling that pocket dimension impressive is like looking at a shack in the middle nowhere and marveling at it like its the Taj Mahal.

And every spell is like this across the board. Flashy in the moment but not actually world changingly consequential.

Sometimes I think the simple existence of Wish throws off the bell curve so severely that people greatly overestimate what high level magic is not only capable of but actually does.

I'll take your oil lamp, barn and cow and raise you a barn and Prestidigitation. Like, the issue with your example isn't "look how powerful mundane options are" it was "what happens when you apply fire to kindling'. And guess what, casters can create fire without even trying.

Pocket dimensions aren't powerful because of their grand size and lavish design. They are powerful because you have them with you, forever. It isn't a shack in the middle of nowhere, it is a shack in you back pocket, always.

And what about things like literal immortality? Like, arcane casters can just do that. Immortal, with basically no strings attached just a bit of gold. And I do mean a bit, it only costs 3,000 gp while a warship costs 25,000 gp.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

I know you guys hear this a lot from me, but you really should check out the martials in Level Up. Covers a lot of this ground.

 

[Minigiant]

Okay, question. Why does it have to be a magical weapon?

I mean, in theory that entire fight, as bad-ass as it was, would have ended instantly if it wasn't The Sword of Light and was just... a sword. It would be like saying "look how bad-ass this fighter is, with his armor of immunity to all magic, he can't be taken out by mere magic-users, you need a bad-ass fighter to take him out" Like... are we really going to pretend the quality of the swordsman matters there?

And sure, they say that he is drawing out the sword's full power yadda yadda yadda, but the trick is in the phrasing. It is the SWORD'S power, not HIS power. What is Docter Strange without the Eye of Agamoto? Still the flippin' sorcerer supreme.

It's not drawing out the swords power.

Only a master swordsman can deflect.
Only a master swordsman can brace a hold the sword when the sword hit by a 9th level spell.
Only a master swordsman can swing an energized sword into a wave of energy.
Only a master swordsman hit the veil between planes.

The sword is magic of easy. I rule a nonmagical sword made of special material can do the same.

5e just makes adamant and mithral magic for some reason.

 

[Emberashh]

IIRC correctly, when I did some math and some digging in Google maps, the meteor storm spell's area of effect would have hit like 80% of the volume 10-story office building I was in at the time.

Not to be crass, but you can do much more damage with some jet fuel and heinous murder. No reality warping required to crash a plane into a building.

Outside that, you have things like Mirage Arcane (a 7th level spell) that can affect a square mile of terrain, with a casting range of "sight".

And while holograms are still in their infancy as a technology, theres nothing that strictly says something like a Holodeck couldn't be built to cover an even larger area, providing more or less the same effect.

Not to mention things like plane shift, teleportation, resurrection, true polymorph.

Which again comes down to what one can actually do with these things. There's not a lot to these, and they can't really be bent to do things they're not explicitly meant to.

Which, ironically, reveals an issue thats rather perverse, as a DM could easily call for a check to use, say, a teleportation spell in a way not covered by its description.

Bur meanwhile, everytime it seems that I point out that Improvise Action exists, which gives martials the ability to try for basically anything they want through an adjudicated check, people get really miffed and start grumbling about mother may I, as though thats not literally the same thing as the caster getting an arcana check to use a spell unconventionally.

 

[Gammadoodler]

It's not drawing out the swords power.

Only a master swordsman can deflect.
Only a master swordsman can brace a hold the sword when the sword hit by a 9th level spell.
Only a master swordsman can swing an energized sword into a wave of energy.
Only a master swordsman hit the veil between planes.

The sword is magic of easy. I rule a nonmagical sword made of special material can do the same.

5e just makes adamant and mithral magic for some reason.

Ok, but let's say everything you've mentioned about the master swordsman is true, but the sword isn't magic or made of special material or whatever.

Why is this a problem?

 

[Vaalingrade]

5e just makes adamant and mithral magic for some reason.

It's part of the same effort to support Guy At the Gym enjoyers: Nothing can be special or interesting without being magic.

I remember when the primary source of alchemy was the rogue who had the skills to make it a worthwhile pursuit. They made that caster only all the way back in 3.5. Stirring naturally occurring ingredients became the exclusive domain of magic. Nowit's hammering naturally occurring ores.

Can't wait for drinking potions to require spellcasting ability.

 

[Emberashh]

Like, the issue with your example isn't "look how powerful mundane options are" it was "what happens when you apply fire to kindling'.

Not so much an issue as a feature. The point is that what spells can do is relative, and just because magic is inherently reality warping relative to our real world, doesn't make that an appropriate moniker in a world where magic actually does exist and is well permeated as part of that reality.

A meteor storm is flashy, but not inherently something "more" than a simple wild fire just by virtue of being difficult magic.

It isn't a shack in the middle of nowhere, it is a shack in you back pocket, always.

Like this spiffy bag of holding I bought at Wal-Bogs with a coupon. whoop di doo.

And what about things like literal immortality?

Peanuts. (And incidentally also something we may well be getting close to doing in our real world)

 

[Gammadoodler]

Not to be crass, but you can do much more damage with some jet fuel and heinous murder. No reality warping required to crash a plane into a building.



And while holograms are still in their infancy as a technology, theres nothing that strictly says something like a Holodeck couldn't be built to cover an even larger area, providing more or less the same effect.



Which again comes down to what one can actually do with these things. There's not a lot to these, and they can't really be bent to do things they're not explicitly meant to.

Which, ironically, reveals an issue thats rather perverse, as a DM could easily call for a check to use, say, a teleportation spell in a way not covered by its description.

Bur meanwhile, everytime it seems that I point out that Improvise Action exists, which gives martials the ability to try for basically anything they want through an adjudicated check, people get really miffed and start grumbling about mother may I, as though thats not literally the same thing as the caster getting an arcana check to use a spell unconventionally.

Yeah, so a wizard is "only" able to replicate a feat whose "only" requirements are that the society has several centuries worth of scientific tradition and the established industrial base of a modern first world economy. An ability to get past the security measures of a modern society, to hijack a device that takes between 25 days and 2-3 months and over 500 million dollars to build, and have the skill and ability to crash it into a building, killing themselves in the process.

And then we're going to point to the potential for humanity to develop and deploy science fiction technology over an area it has not even been deployed in within the fiction by a utopian science fiction society?

And that will be a basis for a conclusion of.."see not that big a deal really".

By the way, we haven't even mentioned that our wizard...one dude..can do BOTH of these things..EVERY DAY.

 

[Emberashh]

It's part of the same effort to support Guy At the Gym enjoyers: Nothing can be special or interesting without being magic.

I remember when the primary source of alchemy was the rogue who had the skills to make it a worthwhile pursuit. They made that caster only all the way back in 3.5. Stirring naturally occurring ingredients became the exclusive domain of magic. Nowit's hammering naturally occurring ores.

Can't wait for drinking potions to require spellcasting ability.

You can't breath your class doesn't give you any spell slots