Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6152291" data-attributes="member: 2067">When you think about casters vs. fighters, the big point is: what do the rules allow non-spellcasters to do to affect the game? It's important that it is in the rules, hard-coded, because that gives the player agency and control over the resolution of the actions they take. But pre-Non-Weapon-Proficiency Fighters, for instance, don't have much mechanically except attack rolls and defenses. All they can do by the rules to affect the game is hit things. Now, at a good table, that's fine -- no one notices the absence of other interesting things, because the DM is solid and inventive and it works. Good tables fix all problems. But it is a problem, because if that fighter wants to do something, they can't rely on the rules, they need to rely on the DM's control of the situation -- and DMs vary wildly in their level of responsibility and skill. The player is essentially asking the DM for permission to do something. It works well if the DM is a benevolent dictator, but a bad ruling can sour an entire night, and the player of the fighter relies in the DM making good rulings more than the player of the wizard. Because the wizard, by the rules, has more stuff they can do -- make fireballs and charm people and fly and make things invisible. All without really asking for DM permission, because the rules let them do it. The DM can always deny (and in early e's, denial was often encouraged), but the assumption is to allow. Even when NWP's and skills came around, fighter-types often got fewer points and less diversity than other classes, because they were predefined to be all about combat. Monolithic specialization like that doesn't lead to a very diverse play experience, honestly, at least without substantially asking the DM for permission to do things.And then along comes 4e and your fighter can have a power that says "All the orcs in the room rush me, and I spin around to hit them all!" And now you can have the rules say that something happens. Still basically in combat, but that's 4e's powers system for ya. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Personally, a lot of the "narrative control" options seem waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too frickin' meta for me. And I'm definitely from the camp of "no one is driving the bus"  (or more specifically, random chance and die rolls drive the bus and the rest of us just try to hold on and react). So while I'm sympathetic to the ends, a lot of the means leave me personally cold. I like the idea of taking some of that control AWAY from spellcasters (ie: spells are no longer assumed things that you can always use effectively) as a first step.</blockquote>

Verification