Mundane/Simple Fighter Pre-build

[Tony Vargas]

From a 5e thread that drifted, then a 4e thread that drifted, again:

just for the edification of the audience:

E1 - Spinning Sweep - damage and knock prone
D1 - Brute Strike - damage
U2 - No Opening - Cancel combat advantage against you
E3 - Precise Strike - damage
D5 - Dizzying Blow - damage and immobilize
U6 - Battle Awareness - bonus to initiative
E7 - Reckless Strike - damage
D9 - Victorious Surge - damage, small heal
U10 - Into the Fray - extra move

Unless a fighter doing a small heal is supernatural/mystical (a la Second Wind), or dailies/encounters are supernatural/mystical, pretty easy to make a pretty mundane fighter.

If you're willing to tweak a bit, you could even make a 'default simple fighter' progression (or one for each of the two builds in the PH, say), using the Essentials "Power Strike" Encounter in place of all Encounters and a similar scaling daily (maybe based on Brute Strike for the Greatweapon, and Comeback Strike for the S&B Guardian) in place of all dailies (Feats & Utilities could also be pre-picked). Players wanting to ease into the game via the traditional fighter-as-training-wheels-class could just play that (only one build decision, S&B or two-hander), but if they ever got bored with it, start retraining the default choices for others that interested them and fit their concept of the character as it evolved.

You wouldn't want do that with all classes, but maybe one of each role: Fighter, Rogue, Cleric... OK, each role other than controller, "Simple Controller" is just an oxymoron...

Sorcerer was always the simple striker by virtue of always having the extra damage on, later slayer came and was even simpler.

I suggest we move this conversation to the old eds' forum

Failed my save vs Suggestion... (OK, or you hit my WILL, whatever).


The idea of a simple pre-build always appealed to me. Pregens work so well for introducing new players to the game, a pre-planned build would seem the obvious way to keep that rolling if it'd be helpful to keep things 'simple' a while longer.

 

[Tony Vargas]

My 'simple fighter' is lose all daily & encounter powers — keeping utility powers and features other than armor+weapons+skills and gain the following:
Power called "Fighter's Strike" which is a basic attack that does 1w+stat, uses Str for most things, Dex if using light blades, light thrown or projectile weapons. Ideally, Combat Challenge for regular Fighters, which this build does not get, has to use that power.

Class Feature: "Dual Fighter's Strike" which allows Fighter's Strike to be used twice when used as a standard.

That's it. It functions in a really straightforward way, doing approximately the amount of damage it ought to do. Yes, boring as all get out, but really easy to toss to the guy who just wants to bash things and not deal with complexity.

So basically a fighter version of the Scout?

Which is fine, if the scout & slayer & such seem fine, I guess. I'm curious about working within the AEDU structure, so you'd theoretically retain more consistency...

In my current 4E campaign, we cut back on a lot of options to make play simpler and more streamlined. One of my players has only played 13th Age and a one-shot of an Apocalypse World hack so I didn't want to overwhelm her with options and decision paralysis. This is what we've done so far:
* No races, backgrounds, themes, ability score increases, or action points.
* Feats only gained every 1st, 4th, 8th levels and heavily curated to only include simple options.
* No magic items, replaced largely with boons and grandmaster training.
* Monster attacks/defenses scale at 1/2 level instead of 1/level.
* Monster hit points reduced by 25%....
Its worked very well for us so far.

I like the idea of a simplified or 'default' version of certain classes that can be complete & fully-contributing, with minimal decisions by the player at chargen/level-up, and that can later be retrained when they have an interest in customizing. Backgrounds, Themes, Paths & Destinies are all technically optional, so could be left out. Feats could be concentrated on simple bonuses that could be folded in.

And everything just goes into a traditional class-advancement table.

Oh, and made the thread a wiki...

 

[heretic888]

On the note of simpler options, has anyone experimented with the "No Damage" hits system in Dragon 423?

 

[Garthanos]

On the note of simpler options, has anyone experimented with the "No Damage" hits system in Dragon 423?

if we are simplifying that arena...
A long time ago I experimented with hitpointless D&D where you made saves vs unconciousness instead of counting and tracking hit points. Each time you were hit you made 1 save modified by how strong the attack was and if you were hit in combat one save afterwards during cool down. It was rather vicious and undermined heroics... kind of felt like runequest.

 

[Garthanos]

Note there is a part of me who had years and years of uber simple martial classes being presented by D&D, who really just emotes that the fraction of folk who actually wanted the boringly simple (which is probably no larger than would want boringly simple blaster casters) can just go somewhere else they have their cake.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Note there is a part of me who had years and years of uber simple martial classes being presented by D&D, who really just emotes that the fraction of folk who actually wanted the boringly simple (which is probably no larger than would want boringly simple blaster casters) can just go somewhere else they have their cake.

Nod.

Part of the argument for simple options, though, is as a default training-wheels path that can gently introduce new players to the game. It's /hardly/ necessary in the case of 4e, really, since, for all it's depth of options and cloud of chaff feats, it's the clearest & most consistent D&D has ever gotten. In fact, it's counter-productive to do it the way Essentials did, since it actually makes the game less consistent (more complex), and creates a barrier to ever taking those training wheels off.


So the idea, here, and I didn't set up the wiki first post well to encourage it, is to build this hypothetical simple (and or mundane) fighter as a default build.

A version sticking to the rules would be fine, especially for the 'mundane' side of the exercise, which was the point [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] made.

What I envisioned was a 'spammer' that just got multiple uses of a single encounter & daily, but could go off the reservation and start retraining them at any time.



...


BTW, I don't suppose there's an easy way to format a table in the board's markup that others could easily fill in, is there?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

BTW, I don't suppose there's an easy way to format a table in the board's markup that others could easily fill in, is there?

Create a thread and check the 'wiki' option, then anyone can edit any post. The table markup is just basically the same as in HTML with the usual square brackets (I believe you also MUST specify a table width if you want vBulletin to render it reliably).