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

[Emberashh]

Can we objectively say that one group is right and the other is wrong?

They're both right and wrong.

On the one hand, a fixed world is considerably better to run as its both less complicated to run and prep, and establishes a consistency that lets player choices, successes, and failures actually matter, rather than being the preordained whims of the DM.

On the other, locking players out of an adventure is just bad adventure design, as is undermining player choices by directly countering them in a way divorced from the fiction.

Its one thing to have cold immune enemies in, say, a Frozen Hell Fortress type place. Its another to have such enemies popping up in the Bubblegum Forest.

And insofar as items goes, the mantra of Quest For It should reign. Placing player catered rewards in the adventures already being run is fine (unless its egregious; finding the Demon Pike of Beezlebub in the Bubblegum Forest is not fine), but if they're explicitly seeking such things, then they ought to be able to find it somewhere appropriate if they go looking.

 

[Remathilis]

In turn creating so much more room for actually interesting spells and add-on mechanics.

No interesting! Just reflavor! Make up your own interesting!

 

[Scott Christian]

Considering most people don't agree with this premise, there is a very-very-very easy house-rule fix - limit spell books. Make sure the caster only has as many spells as the martial has class features. Done.

 

[TheSword]

Well, here's the enemy, Mind Flayer Arcanist, a standard CR 8. So whoever designed this critter said to themselves "this is a perfectly acceptable challenge for characters". I don't think creating an adventure where the Arcanist has to defend/protect a location is unreasonable. So the question you have is more "should the DM make it possible for the player characters to bypass a Wall of Force, if doing so is necessary to complete an adventure?".

And I've noticed there's two schools of thought about this when it comes to D&D.

The first is, yes, of course, the game needs to be adjusted to suit the players. If your Fighter chooses to use a pike as his weapon, the DM should let him find a magical pike. If your Sorcerer exclusively uses cold spells, the DM shouldn't use enemies immune to cold. If the enemy has a Wall of Force prepared, a way to defeat it must exist in the adventure.

The second is, the world is the world, and if the players can't adapt, that's too bad. Thus no magic pikes exist. Cold immune enemies exist where they should exist. Can't bypass a Wall of Force? Better luck next time.

I've seen people claim on these forums that they are firmly in one camp or the other. Can we objectively say that one group is right and the other is wrong?

Firstly the world is not the World. The world has been planned, sculpted and curated by a living breathing person who chose to combine a mind flayer arcanist with a location that couldn’t be accessed any other way and an arbitrary victory condition that took less time that the wall of force’s duration (don’t get me started on how how a mindflayer can concentrate on a spell and conduct a ritual meh).

Unless you’re randomising these elements you’re making conscious choices and need to own up to these. If your conscious decision means only one spell is capable of solving the problem then it’s just bad on several levels. In other words ‘single point of failure’ adventures are just not very good.

Now it’s not a problem if the PCs missed the clues that led to a solution and therefore they fail and deal with the consequences of the the Mindflayer bringing the city of Ooltool forward in time 10,000 years to the present day. That’s not the same as saying winning or losing a one shot is based on knowledge of a single spell. That’s not a caster problem it’s a DM problem. What if the party wizard is a necromancer or an illusionist?

So I ask again what are the magical dependencies that martial characters need to be able to have a reasonable chance at succeeding at reasonable challenges?

 

[Gammadoodler]

The reason this argument goes no-where is because the solutions proposed don’t solve the essential problems for a few reasons.

• They either just increase power (improving saves / resisting effects they already had a chance to resist)
• Or llow fighters to do things they could already do better (see level up manouvers)

Because nobody has actually agreed what the essential abilities that every character needs to have access to are, there’s no actual proposal that takes them into account which seems to be a fundamental flaw in the argument. We see fighter class proposals again and again that just make a more powerful fighter. That makes me think that no matter how it’s dressed up and debated folks just want more powerful fighters.

As a result everyone is caught in the long grass bickering about what fighters or rogues should be able to do, instead of working out what they need to be able to do. Conversations around supernatural and magical are pointless. Nobody really cares about that other than absolute die-hards.

Keeping in mind that you have stated your position that there is no problem here that needs solving.

I hardly think that your contribution to the conversation is additive for the purposes of "going somewhere".

Perhaps if less effort needed to be devoted to trying to argue with folks like you, more effort could be devoted to finding the common ground.

Or perhaps not, and thats ok too. As a group we are a bunch of random folks on the internet. As such we have limited to no incentive to compromise on the things we find important. So we discuss what we like and what we don't. Sometimes there will be common ground and sometimes there won't.

It does not take away from the fact that we all desire to in some way address a thing we all agree is broken.

 

[Emberashh]

So I ask again what are the magical dependencies that martial characters need to be able to have a reasonable chance at succeeding at reasonable challenges?

This I think also ties into the issue of not actually giving an adventuring party enough to do concurrently. Its not so much that martials need some magical ability to be useful, and more that theres seldom anything to do that isn't either easily resolved by a turn-off-this-mechanic button or is directly meant to be a magical problem.

The simultaneous devaluation of substantive mechanical exploration and distribution of absurdly cheap access to turn-off-mechanics buttons play a big part into why that is.

Martials have need to be able to resolve problems on their own when the Mage has their own problems that they can't divert attention away from.

I believe it was this topic where I talked about my mountain top encounter with a Ancient Red Dragon-lead cabal of Arch Mages leading an army of thousands of Orcs to besiege a city, where the point is for the players to break the siege and defeat the bads without letting the city fall to ruin.

Part of why that encounter works, by my estimation, is that it successfully diverts the attention of the party. The party mages are the only ones who can really tackle the rival Arch Mages, and can't waste turns slinging spells at the Dragon or the Orcs, and the rest have to both beat back the Orc army and fend off the Dragon long enough until at least one of these elements collapses dead, and then they can justify focusing fire to win the day; but even then, the couple of times Ive run this the party usually still ends up split between the Dragon and the Orcs. (The Arch Mages understanably have always ended up the first to fall).

At a much smaller and less grandiose scale, the same general tenet applies. Attentions can be divided not just by way of multiple problems but even spatially. The Dragon in that example typically keeps 2-3 players roaming through the battlefield as they chase it, preventing any easy means of them jumping in on the other two targets, both of which keep their respective players relatively locked in place separate from one another.

In the same vien, the classic heist is another example of how this can be done, and theres a dearth of environmental puzzles that can serve as inspiration too. Even the "infiltrate the Lords Feast" sort of quest. Theres a lot of options here, is what Im saying.

And when you design adventures like this, your Martials don't have to compete with Mages. They can just do things on their own in their own way, because the situation at hand can't just be turned off by a button.

Thus, you can design Martials any way you want. It fundamentally doesn't matter if they can match Mages or not, because, by way of how adventures are designed, they will always be able to contribute regardless of what the Mages do short of them neglecting their own proverbial turf to deliberately intrude on the Martials, at which point we're looking at a bad player.

The only real way to dispute the validity of this approach is by pointing at Simulacrum, but that spell, like Wish, is just bad game design masquerading as some integral part of the game; obviously broken things that can't easily be fixed without deleting them outright are outliers in the system, and shouldn't be the basis of any of these arguments.

 

[Vaalingrade]

When I say "magic", I mean it in the broadest sense, including soft scifi.

I'd like to respectfully ask you not to as it's muddling the conversation unnecessarily.

 

[nevin]

This I think also ties into the issue of not actually giving an adventuring party enough to do concurrently. Its not so much that martials need some magical ability to be useful, and more that theres seldom anything to do that isn't either easily resolved by a turn-off-this-mechanic button or is directly meant to be a magical problem.

this is a great observation. A lot of DM's get overwhelmed and try to simplify each encounter to make it easier for them to deal with. Which makes it easier for a clever player to deal with. It's harder to plan for the entire party but it makes for more rewarding encounter's where everyone is happy they had the entire party there.

 

[Minigiant]

This I think also ties into the issue of not actually giving an adventuring party enough to do concurrently. Its not so much that martials need some magical ability to be useful, and more that theres seldom anything to do that isn't either easily resolved by a turn-off-this-mechanic button or is directly meant to be a magical problem.

The simultaneous devaluation of substantive mechanical exploration and distribution of absurdly cheap access to turn-off-mechanics buttons play a big part into why that is.

Martials have need to be able to resolve problems on their own when the Mage has their own problems that they can't divert attention away from.

I believe it was this topic where I talked about my mountain top encounter with a Ancient Red Dragon-lead cabal of Arch Mages leading an army of thousands of Orcs to besiege a city, where the point is for the players to break the siege and defeat the bads without letting the city fall to ruin.

Part of why that encounter works, by my estimation, is that it successfully diverts the attention of the party. The party mages are the only ones who can really tackle the rival Arch Mages, and can't waste turns slinging spells at the Dragon or the Orcs, and the rest have to both beat back the Orc army and fend off the Dragon long enough until at least one of these elements collapses dead, and then they can justify focusing fire to win the day; but even then, the couple of times Ive run this the party usually still ends up split between the Dragon and the Orcs. (The Arch Mages understanably have always ended up the first to fall).

At a much smaller and less grandiose scale, the same general tenet applies. Attentions can be divided not just by way of multiple problems but even spatially. The Dragon in that example typically keeps 2-3 players roaming through the battlefield as they chase it, preventing any easy means of them jumping in on the other two targets, both of which keep their respective players relatively locked in place separate from one another.

In the same vien, the classic heist is another example of how this can be done, and theres a dearth of environmental puzzles that can serve as inspiration too. Even the "infiltrate the Lords Feast" sort of quest. Theres a lot of options here, is what Im saying.

And when you design adventures like this, your Martials don't have to compete with Mages. They can just do things on their own in their own way, because the situation at hand can't just be turned off by a button.

Thus, you can design Martials any way you want. It fundamentally doesn't matter if they can match Mages or not, because, by way of how adventures are designed, they will always be able to contribute regardless of what the Mages do short of them neglecting their own proverbial turf to deliberately intrude on the Martials, at which point we're looking at a bad player.

The only real way to dispute the validity of this approach is by pointing at Simulacrum, but that spell, like Wish, is just bad game design masquerading as some integral part of the game; obviously broken things that can't easily be fixed without deleting them outright are outliers in the system, and shouldn't be the basis of any of these arguments.

The issue is that D&D is based on these outliers.

THE problem is that these outlier spells were originally designed to be randomly got as treasure OR handed out by the DM.

When WOTC let casters choose their treasure but not let martials choose their treasure, that is what broke the game.

There is nothing wrong with Wish and Simulacrum. Casters were not supposed to be guaranteed to get them.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Unless you’re randomising these elements you’re making conscious choices and need to own up to these. If your conscious decision means only one spell is capable of solving the problem then it’s just bad on several levels. In other words ‘single point of failure’ adventures are just not very good.

Yes, the designers should own up to this.