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

[Chaosmancer]

It came from a magic creature

Interesting logic. But the tooth was not stated to have any magical properties. You can insist it did, but by the same logic elf or dwarf teeth would be magical.

I mean in the Clark's 3rd laws sense
An assault weapon is high tech in D&D.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

An assault rifle in FR narratively the same as a magic weapon.

And mechanically it is not a magical weapon, because Clark's 3rd Law isn't a DnD rule. And we have canonical guns in FR anyways. Not assault rifles, but they aren't "sufficiently advanced" that no one could figure them out.

The warrior is not nothing. They still clobber foes ofa lower tier. But equal tier combat require equal tier equipment.

You don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

And you don't bring a sword to a bow fight. Not because swords are lower tier weapons, but because of RANGE. That's what bringing a knife to a gunfight MEANS. It doesn't mean that someone with a knife is incapable of killing someone with a gun. That's not only stupid, but we have multiple instances of someone with a knife killing people with guns in popular media.

And, yes, your logic does make the warrior nothing. They are, in fact, an entire tier WEAKER than anything they are supposedly fighting on equal terms, because they REQUIRE high-tier equipment to win.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Good one.

If a normal sword can then a fireball or disintegrate can but if a normal sword can’t then a normal disintegrate shouldn’t.

Yes. Well, disintegrate is pretty powerful magic. IMO if it isn’t a decently big deal to spend the slot, the wizard needs fewer slots of that level.

That's just damage.

Which is the specific thing you’ve been on about that I’ve been replying to.

The OP's first post involves flight, teleportation, and plane shifting. And there are even more issues to contend with.

Nothing the OP suggested requires a whole new game, though. It’s just new feature, ie “rules exceptions”.

Your fighter can kill a Asmodeus with a teacup. How does he get to Big A without magic?

Downtime: Research, finds a particular crossroads that can lead to the Ninth Hell at midnight on [numeralogically significant date), if certain rituals are observed and the right ancient names spoken. Doing so doesn’t require any internal magic, but success is more fully assured by sacrificing either an innocent or a powerful magical object.

Or, the fighter goes to the Arch Deacon of The Northern Holy Church, asks for his blessing upon his weapons and his person, and to be sent by divine magic into the very throne room of The Adversary, if it be possible.

And Adsodeus can fly and teleport and summon devils. And cast most spells.

Great. The fighter can bullseye an imp at 600ft with a longbow, and can force all enemies below a certain CR to save vs death as an action by spending a use of action surge (bye to many of those devils), and can physically interact with spells. All of which just requires adding new features and optional rules.

 

[Incenjucar]

I am on board with a fighter starting a bar brawl with a bunch of elves to collect teeth so they can make a god-killing morning star by gluing the teeth to a stick.

 

[Eubani]

The Wizard works because the class defines a character that utilizes magic by research and learning. The Sorcerer works as a class because it defines a spellcaster that inherits or embodies a type of magic. The Cleric works as a class because it defines a magic user with divine servitude. I can go on like this with all spellcasting classes. The Fighter fails because it tries to be all warrior archetypes. If they were willing to give the Fighter extra classes and broke it down into more strongly defined archetypes with greater identity, then I would guess that we would see better outcomes with better and more flavorful mechanics.

 

[Clint_L]

... You know that's almost funny? Because, you know the #1 most common complaint about solo boss monsters? "See, I made this powerful BBEG to fight my party, and on Round One the Wizard [insert spell here] and shut down the entire fight! I just don't know what to do!?"

And what are the solutions given?

Legendary Resistance -> AKA turn off round 1 spell victories
Add Mooks -> AKA make it a fight against multiple targets which you just said wizards and other casters excel at.

Wizards are weak against single targets? Hardly, they are so powerful that you often CAN'T have a single target boss monster.

No, what I stated was that fireball is exceptional against multiple weak targets. I mean, are we acting like it's news that fireball is kind of OP?

Most other AoE is more balanced, either because it's weaker or trickier to position (i.e. no one complains about lightning bolt, even though it does the same damage as fireball). But sure, I agree that casters tend to be better at AoE than ST (again being cautious, since this argument tends to constantly devolve into fighters and wizards, without even accounting for subclass). More because of control than damage, IMO; a cleverly used web spell can be encounter changing.

Yeah, legendary resistances are aimed right at save or suck spells. The point being? Legendary resistances are very much a thing in this game that spellcasters have to deal with. Good thing there are no legendary resistances to "great sword to the face." For that matter, there are all kinds of other resistances that mostly affect spellcasters, especially at high level play.

The example given was a dragon battle. We've all probably run our fair share of those. Given the options offered, I stand by my argument that I would rather have two fighters and two rogues rather than two wizards and two clerics (though obviously one of each would be more optimal, which is the design intent).

Edit: Hmmm...mathing it out...I dunno. I think for sure the fighters are excellent in the dragon encounter - high DPR and survivability. The rogues are a lot weaker. With the clerics hopefully tanking the wizards could try to focus on burning through those resistances to get off a lucky polymorph on the dragon or something, though the problem will be surviving long enough to do so - dragons are smart and mobile and can feasibly kill a level 15 wizard (probably, what, 75 or so HP?) in one round, two on the outside unless the wizards are focusing their magic on survivability, but then it's a matter of diminishing returns - can the clerics do enough damage to get the dragon off the wizards? Probably not.

Let's assume an Ancient White Dragon, since that seems like a reasonable challenge for our 4 level 15 party members. Assuming two fighters, I'll make both plain old champions with modest magic for level 15 (say, +2 weapons and +2 AC). One is a tank with duelist and AC 22, the other has a great sword and AC 20). They could have lots of feats but I'll just worry about giving both sentinel and toughness, but great weapon master on the one. Won't bother with advantage, though realistically one fighter should be able to get it pretty often.

The tank is doing around 30 damage per round, doubled on the first round because action surge. The GWM fighter will do around 33 per round (honestly, without advantage GWM hardly does anything), again doubled on the first round.

The Ancient White has 333 HP, so those two fighters alone can kill it in just over four rounds, once they are on it. Meanwhile, conservatively assuming they have 199 HP (con 16 and toughness), that dragon is going to take considerably longer against them. Its breath hits them for around 47 damage on average (factoring in indomitable x2), while its combined melee and legendary attacks, focused on one fighter (averaging out the AC) will do 55 DPR. If it was just the two fighters against the dragon, odds are that it gets one unconscious before the other finishes it off.

 

[Hussar]

Funny how those Critical Role stats from above ignore the Exandria campaign where the top damage dealer is Nydas at 75000 damage as a draconic bloodline sorcerer.

To be fair though the rogue clocks in at number two and unsurprisingly the paladin at number three.

 

[James Gasik]

I asked you to quote me saying "you must follow attack rules".

You haven't done that.



If we want Martial to have more options its kind of strange to lament the inevitability that those options will become used more.

When those options become problematic for game balance because I made an off-the-cuff ruling? Not strange at all. Basically what happened was (and I don't remember everything) but basically I'd said that a called shot would give the enemy a debuff (blind in one eye, unable to use a hand, that short of thing). What started happening as a result was enemies would be quickly rendered functionally useless but still alive with hit points remaining; in effect, I had allowed the players to do end runs around hit points.

I then tried to come up with hit point thresholds (ie, to get a debuff, you had to deal a % of the target's hit points), but as enemies got tougher, I quickly had players griping that an enemy took an arrow to the eye and wasn't effected, which made "no sense" to them. I eventually scrapped the whole idea, and it went the way of critical fumbles in my games.

 

[TheSword]

Is what the wizard does with saves weaker than the fighters attacks? Not really. Can the wizard still mash the blinded enemy with cantrips... absolutely. Often for similar damage to what the fighter can do. Also, does the enemy get disadvantage on dodging dex saves because they are blind? (honestly not sure about that one)

Cantrip dealing similar damage to fighters… are you cantripping?

 

[Emberashh]

When those options become problematic for game balance because I made an off-the-cuff ruling?

Yes but that points to the issue being the need to not induce a balance issue just because its improv.

Guidance helps with that, but a good rule of thumb is that mechanically, if casters can do somerhing and a Martial can do it through mundane means (with an improv ruling to structure it), then there is no balance issue.

In previous posts I gave examples of how to approach that. Adding to a AC ir DC and swapping saving throws for flat, random durations are an easy way to keep the balance between the resourceless nature of an IA against its resource-based equivalent. And theres a multitude of other ways you could take to approach it.*

It isn't really complicated, and obviously nobody expects an inexperienced DM to just know this off hand, which is why everyone here and even WOTC themselves can and does agree DM guidance needs to be dramatically improved.

And ultimately, its not an either/or. Others keep trying to argue with me acting as though pointing to IA means we can't have more explicit things, but thats obviously bunk. Its not a zero sum game where integrating IA better means we can't also do maneuvers or whatever.

*And when you start thinking about these things you can start looking at how you can tailor whatever mechanics to the specific action thats desired. For instance if I had a Rogue player that wanted to ricochet a bunch of throwing knives off a wall, Id be inclined to set that up as a dice pool. Or, say they're in a duel and they want to do some sort of 1-2 fisticuffs sort of thinf; id use exploding dice keying off their regular attack.

And so on. Some would try to say that leaves room for inconsistent usage in the future but its trivial to just write these down somewhere if its that important, and the game isn't really that adversely affected if the mechanics swap around or change. Especially because, in a context where you're not being argumentative and stingy, you wouldn't be saying to the player they can't do the cool thing. If they're still getting their kicks, then there really isn't a problem.

 

[Krachek]

That's just damage.

The OP's first post involves flight, teleportation, and plane shifting. And there are even more issues to contend with.

Your fighter can kill a Asmodeus with a teacup. How does he get to Big A without magic?

And Adsodeus can fly and teleport and summon devils. And cast most spells.

The OP ask for less Magical Dependencies in a very drastic way. He dont consider magic items that can allow flying, teleporting, plane shifting.
I don’t know why those don’t count, maybe because fighter can’t craft themselves those items by class feature, and fighter rely on DM fiat to acquire them. Evil DM fiat!

If players and DM want to go in hell take a fight to Asmodeus that will happen. How and with what equipement that don’t matter much.
the PC may work hard to achieve it and most of the time they will succeed.
That is the core game of DnD since the beginning.