D&D 5E Party optimisation vs Character optimisation

[sithramir]

Now I want to play a Conan character

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Now I want to play a Conan character

Do it, it will be fun! Be sure to read some of the stories first so you have more to go off of than the popular stereotype, which is mostly wrong. (E.g. armor, not loincloths.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's the nature of Internet forum discussions, especially on Enworld where context gets lost with every quote,

So true.

That's what happened with Dying Earth; notice that I bowed out as soon as you stopped making factually incorrect claims about Phandaal's and Pandelume's respective limitations.

I don't recall mentioning them, specifically. Did you ever find a reference to a Dying Earth magician memorizing more than 6 spells, BTW?

The below is written in the assumption that by "D&D" you mean "5E D&D"

I'm sorry if it's topic drift, but I often mean D&D more generally, and say 5e or 'classic D&D' or 3.x/Pathfinder when I want to get more specific. Thing is, 5e is (intentionally, according to what Mr. Mearls was saying leading up to and during the playtest) quite representative of D&D in general. So it shouldn't make a big difference.

Well, Pug's a protagonist, and he creates wormholes between the stars (not possible in 5E), he can travel backwards through time (also not possible in 5E), and destroys the planet Kelewan by creating a rift big enough to hit it with its own moon (definitely not possible in 5E).

Sounds very Lensman - and not very heroic fantasy, at all.

The fantasy equivalent of wormholes would be, in D&D, Gate, Planeshift, and the like. Some version of Wish have had language about how to mess with characters who try to use it for time travel or messing with time - though they'd also give advice about using time travel to mess with non-time-travel wishes.

As mentioned previously, Lord Voldemort can permanently mentally dominate other people, which is beyond the abilities of any spell in 5E. He's not a protagonist, but guess what? Any wizard can cast that spell, including Harry Potter, the 17-year-old protagonist! So that counts too.

Yep. Harry Potter's also one of those sub-genres where everyone of any power is a caster. They're fairly well-modeled by games like Ars Magicka (which has the good sense to warn players that non-mages are decidedly inferior character choices), and Mage (which doesn't even offer non-mages as a PC option). Not at all well by D&D - thanks to Vancian casting as well as the existence of non-casters as PCs.

Though, really, Harry Potter duels are mostly rocket tag - whoever gets the spell off first wins. That bit 3.x/Pathfinder did pretty well.

If D&D were just spelling out that non-casters are just there as mooks and minions and victims to be saved from evil casters, and PC were all meant to be wizards and the like, sure, it'd be a meaningful example. But D&D wasn't trying to emulate that genre, in part because it didn't exist when D&D got rolling.

It's hard to measure the limits of Niven's Warlock (also a protagonist, facing a barbarian with an enchanted sword that makes him invulnerable to everything, but itself), but he tells a story to Hap the Barbarian of casting powerful spells in his younger days, before he'd learned as much as he knows now, of using flashy, showy spells like "armies turned to stone, or wiped out by lightning, instead of simple death spells," so whatever his limits are, he's also clearly working at a scope beyond anything a 5E wizard can manage.

Well, according to himself. Petrification, lightning, and deathspells, though, are all things D&D wizards have been able to do. The first was not suitable for destroying armies in any edition I can think of. The others could two could make some headway, how much depending on the specifics of the ed. What magic did he actually use in the course of the story?

I've read some Niven, but not that particular story. The utterly invulnerable enemy is a cute way to challenge an overpowered protagonist, so I can see how it'd be a glaring exception to the usual genre conventions - it's sure looks like it was written to intentionally invert genre conventions, in fact, like Moorcock's Elric, but moreso.

But, really, what you've got there isn't an heroic fantasy story, name of the character notwithstanding, but a superhero story, a nominally magical superman vs a kryptonite villain, in broad terms.

A science fiction character, an example of genre-inversion, and something as recent as Harry Potter hardly speak for the heroic fantasy genre D&D was trying to emulate - if, indeed, any of them could even be said to be part of it.

Though Harry Potter'd be a fine target for an uban-fantasy game where all PCs are going to be young wizards.

I don't care how you play your game, and I don't even care if you dislike 5E--I just care about the correct facts. You can say that you don't like 5E wizards and think they are too powerful and I won't mind. YMMV. But if you say they can do anything and everything that genre wizards do, well, I will take exception to that because it's factually wrong.

I'm actually doing my best, IRL, to be a 5e evangelist. Especially to new players. One reason I'm keenly aware of how it defies genre expectations in negative ways.

D&D in general has always gone this path of throwing everything a genre caster might do into a long list of spells (and every magic item into a long list, for that matter) and letting casters do tons of them, with a mechanic that only fits one sci-fi series version of 'magic,' and that's an egregious failure, both in terms of modeling genre, and in terms of game balance. Particularly because of the bizarre double-standard in which non-casters are held to RL ideas of realism, and generally don't rise to what corresponding genre archetypes can do, at all (ironically, sometimes they can't even keep up with RL - there was a thread on here about that months ago).

The game would be much better if we could get it closer to a good balance among all the classes, without genre-defying, archetype-based double-standards. It'd mean bringing casters down to the level of individual protagonist characters in genre, and non-casters up to their corresponding archetypes, and further tweaking the lot around for playability, but, even with such sacrifices, would also end up bringing the whole closer to modeling a broader swath of the genre.

Last edited by emdw45; Today at 03:26 PM. Reason: Edited for tone; removing belligerence

Thanks for that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So true.

I made no claims about them, specifically. Did you ever find a reference to a Dying Earth magician memorizing more than 6 spells, BTW?

No, I didn't even look, since I'm not defending a positive claim there and I don't think the question is even well-founded. (E.g. Turjan can memorize three spells in his story, but that doesn't stop him from casting a fourth spell called the Call to the Violent Cloud which he has not memorized.)

Sounds very Lensman - and not very heroic fantasy, at all.

I wasn't aware that the "genre" we were discussing was specifically "heroic fantasy", since AFAIK that genre is pretty much a synonym for "D&D-inspired fantasy." If so, "no heroic fantasy wizard is more powerful than a D&D wizard" becomes a truism. In any case, the Midkemia novels with are far closer to D&D scale and scope than to Lensman. Pug does amazing things on occasion, and destroying Kelewan is probably the biggest of those things, but in Lensman they throw antimatter planets at other planets at lightspeed as a matter of course. Later on you refer to Pug as a "science fiction character" but he isn't except inasmuch as all wizards who follow rules are science fiction characters, which includes all D&D wizards.

The fantasy equivalent of wormholes would be, in D&D, Gate, Planeshift, and the like.

Ehhhh... I'll grant that. I guess you could move between planets in D&D just by plane shifting twice.

Time travel can be problematic in any RPG - even RPGs about Time Travel have issues with it. Some version of Wish have had language about how to mess with characters who try to use it for time travel or messing with time - though they'd also give advice about using time travel to mess with non-time-travel wishes.

That still makes it something beyond the scope of what any 5E caster can do... but I suppose you did say you're not really talking about 5E so we don't have to pursue that. For similar reasons, I'll *snip* discussion of Harry Potter and the Warlock and the others--they may be more powerful than 5E wizards but I could buy them as similar in power to AD&D wizards. Well, I will address this Warlock-related question although it's a tangent not relating to D&D:

Well, according to himself. Petrification, lightning, and deathspells, though, are all things D&D wizards have been able to do. The first was not suitable for destroying armies in any edition I can think of. The others could two could make some headway, how much depending on the specifics of the ed. What magic did he actually use in the course of the story?

Foretelling the future, called down a baseball-sized meteor (presumably moving at 20 to 70 miles per second, as meteors are wont to do) aimed at the back of Hap's head, set up an open-ended kinetic sorcery which used up all the mana in the vicinity (permanently creating a magic dead zone), which destroyed the magic sword and incidentally undid all of the Warlock's youth spells causing him to revert to a 200-year-old bald guy who can barely breathe and quickly goes blind. There's no reason to doubt his word about what he's capable of. The story is mostly about "mana as a non-renewable resource" anyway, so unlike most wizard stories there's no reason to limit the protagonist's magic in order to keep the tension high. It's not that kind of story.

Now back to D&D:

If D&D were just spelling out that non-casters are just there as mooks and minions and victims to be saved from evil casters, and PC were all meant to be wizards and the like, sure, it'd be a meaningful example. But D&D wasn't trying to emulate that genre, in part because it didn't exist when D&D got rolling.

Arguendo, AD&D high-level wizards are the stars of the show, and everyone else becomes a mook. Does that have anything to do with 5E? 5E amped up the fighter-types (in most ways) and amped down the wizards; it's hard to tell where clerics and druids are w/rt AD&D but we can use wizards as rough proxy. Since D&D's essential story is and always has been "all the world's important problems are at least theoretically solvable through controlled application of violence," this actually leaves fighters in a pretty good place w/rt player agency. I think there are fun things to do in D&D that don't directly involve violence, but if you were actually planning to center your game around nonviolent pursuits, you'd probably be playing a different game like GURPS. Most complaints about fighters' limited utility outside of combat seem to be veiled complaints about utility within combat, and 5E has quashed those complaints pretty thoroughly by making fighters fun. We just saw a poster today who feels inspired to play Conan in 5E based on discussion in this thread!

I'm actually doing my best, IRL, to be a 5e evangelist.

But, D&D in general has always gone this path of throwing everything a genre caster might do into a long list of spells and letting casters do tons of them, with a mechanic that only fits one sci-fi series version of 'magic,' and that's an egregious failure, both in terms of modeling genre, and in terms of game balance. Particularly because of the bizarre double-standard in which non-casters are held to RL ideas of realism, and generally don't rise to what corresponding genre archetypes can do, at all (ironically, sometimes they can't even keep up with RL - there was a thread on here about that months ago).

The game would be much better if we could get it closer to a good balance among all the classes, without archetype-based double-standards. It'd mean bringing casters down to the level of individual protagonist characters in genre, and non-casters up to their corresponding archetypes, and further tweaking the lot around for playability, but, even with such sacrifices, would also end up bringing the whole closer to modeling a broader swath of the genre.

5E already did both of these things. It's not a be-all end-all edition, especially for people who want and like powerful magic, but it's certainly doing a good job at the design goal of making fighters and wizards both fun and attractive classes with independent niches, who work well together. If you re-do your analysis with 5E instead of every-D&D-edition as your baseline you may come to different conclusions as to the worthlessness of fighters. And isn't that a more useful analysis in a 5E forum anyway?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I wasn't aware that the "genre" we were discussing was specifically "heroic fantasy", since AFAIK that genre is pretty much a synonym for "D&D-inspired fantasy."

Hardly. It's not like D&D invented the genre, then used Wish to go back in time and inspire REH. It's just easier than typing "high fantasy and swords & sorcery and related sub-genres."

Foretelling the future, called down a baseball-sized meteor (presumably moving at 20 to 70 miles per second, as meteors are wont to do) aimed at the back of Hap's head, set up an open-ended kinetic sorcery which used up all the mana in the vicinity (permanently creating a magic dead zone),

Oh! one of /those/ Niven stories. Got it now.

which destroyed the magic sword and incidentally undid all of the Warlock's youth spells causing him to revert to a 200-year-old bald guy who can barely breathe and quickly goes blind.

Yeah, D&D does fail to model Niven's 'mana' vision of magic pretty thoroughly (popular old school 'mana point' systems notwithstanding). But it has no problem creating functionally (will let you gank the guy with the magic sword) similar anti-magic shells or Mordenkeinen's Disjunction (a good deal less inconvenient, too). No problem delivering very high-damage astrologically-themed effects, including meteor swarm and comet fall.

AD&D high-level wizards are the stars of the show, and everyone else becomes a mook. Does that have anything to do with 5E? 5E amped up the fighter-types (in most ways) and amped down the wizards

Well, first of all, AD&D did do a lot to try to balance classes. It just failed. The attempts, however, were manifold. Wizards, in particular, started out extremely fragile, banned from using mundane armor and all but a few weapons, and with only a single spell (and if it wasn't Sleep, too bad). The idea was that your wizard dying at first level would make up for him being overpowered at 9th level, and campaign-wrecking not long after. I don't think I have to point out the issue with that kind of balance. Casting was also made very difficult - spells took a long time to cast, could be interrupted with attacks, and were both spoiled and memory of them lost if you took even a point of damage or failed a saving throw. On the other side of it, fighters started out durable in basic combat and eventually got pretty awesome saves, and EGG weighted random magic charts heavily in favor of items useable by fighters, so they'd have some more options at higher level.

Every subsequent edition has eased restrictions on casters, and most have not proportionately decreased the number or power of their spells to compensate.

5e wizards, for instance, prepare their spells separately from their slots, and expend the slots to cast them without losing preparation, combining the strategic flexibility of traditional Vancian casters with the tactical flexibility of the 3.5 sorcerer's spontaneous casting. Spells cannot be interrupted, do not provoke OAs, and do not even suffer disadvantage like a ranged attack if they force a save, instead. Casters can prettymuch stand in the middle of melee and blaze away. They have fewer spell slots, but the save DC of all their spells is based on proficiency instead of spell level, so they actually have more spells that have a good chance of working for a baseline build. In addition, they have some spells that can be cast without even consuming slots, and at-will cantrips, as well. So the 'run out of slots' balancing factor, in spite of technically having fewer slots, is actually less of a limitation to them.

5e hasn't left most spells exactly the same, but reigned them in some to compensate for easing up so much on how limited casters are. Some of 'em.

D&D's essential story is and always has been "all the world's important problems are at least theoretically solvable through controlled application of violence," this actually leaves fighters in a pretty good place w/rt player agency

While I don't deny the game's combat focus, DPR machine <> agency. You'd at least want some tactical depth to claim that. At very least.

Most complaints about fighters' limited utility outside of combat seem to be veiled complaints about utility within combat, and 5E has quashed those complaints pretty thoroughly by making fighters fun.

I don't know where you get either of those impressions. 5e fighter do a lot of damage by making multiple attacks with a weapon using a fighting style they picked at first level. You can, as with any class, tack a couple of proficiencies and a perk on it with a Background - and the fact that's actually kind of a big step forward for fighter as far as its non-combat abilities go is a pretty sad comment on how little has ever been done to address that complaint. That's about it.

If you re-do your analysis with 5E instead of every-D&D-edition as your baseline you may come to different conclusions as to the worthlessness of fighters. And isn't that a more useful analysis in a 5E forum anyway?

I think it's helpful to see the trend. The fighter, in 0E & 1e, really defined the tank role. It's job was to stand in a doorway or 10' wide corridor and hit things and take damage so it would die before more valuable characters. Not the greatest role ever, but useful. As long as you were in a dungeon. Later in 1e and in 2e, it changed what it did best and became a TWFing weapon-specialist (or archer) that just did nothing but dish out broken amounts of damage. Technically it still took up space at the front of the party, but things died so fast it hardly mattered. And of course, like everyone else, it could choose a kit. Not that fighter kits were great or anything.

Unfortunately, that is not a big step forward in any other sense. Did the 3.x fighter build on it. No. It took off in a different direction, backing off a little on damage potential, but becoming a remarkably customizable class. Not too versatile once you'd customized him, but temptingly ideal for all sorts of 'concept' martial builds. It was also completely overshadowed by casters by the time you hit double-digit levels, completely dependent on magic items for relevance, and, often, that wonderful concept build wouldn't 'mature' until 6th or 8th level - a narrow window of 'fun' but better than nothing, which is what the fighter was used to. And, did the 4e fighter build on that progress? No, it was backed up to being an early-1e tank and just made better at it, then given a little tactical agency in the form of AEDU martial maneuvers called 'exploits.'

And, did the 5e fighter build on /any/ of that? Nope, it just retraced it's steps back to 2e, and became all about high damage from multiple attacks, plus a Kit. I mean Background.

Edit: Ok, actually that last bit was unfair. Backgrounds are significantly better than 2e kits. Well, 2e fighter and thief kits, unless I've forgotten something good. And the 5e fighter does have vestiges of the 3.x fighter's versatility in fighting styles and archetypes, and a vestige of the 4e fighter's tank role support in one of those fighting styles and an optional feat. And everyone got HD, of course. And, of course, the Battlemaster got a really microscopic vestige of AEDU - just without the A, D, or U - in the form of 'maneuvers.'

There. That's fair.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hardly. It's not like D&D invented the genre, then used Wish to go back in time and inspire REH. It's just easier than typing "high fantasy and swords & sorcery and related sub-genres."

Okay, then in that case Pug definitely fits within the "heroic fantasy" genre for sure, and therefore blowing up planets is something that wizards can do in heroic fantasy but not in D&D. QED. If I needed more examples within your chosen genre-as-I-understand-it I couldn't pick Harry Potter (YA fantasy) or Niven's Warlock (since the Warlock is already a wizard when he becomes a protagonist and not a farm boy), so I'd look instead towards Steven Erikson (Anomander Rake and Lady Envy stand out as the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E wizards, and of course Dassem Ultor and Onos T'oolan are the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E fighters) and, oh, Rand al-Thor from Wheel of Time. I'd have to do some research to find specific examples for Rand since I didn't read the whole series, but the first book leads one to believe he can erase mountains and crack the continental crust, and I think he just gets bigger and badder as time goes on.

So the upshot is: claims that D&D wizards are always better than genre wizards while D&D fighters are always worse than genre fighters are unfounded. Even if you restrict genre to only "heroic fantasy" as you've defined it above (note: you're using a different definition than the 5E DMG), there's still wide variation within genre, and D&D is not at the upper bound of that variation for wizards nor the lower bound for fighters. You could perhaps make an argument that Champion/Battlemaster fighters are uninteresting to you personally, and I would agree personally because Eldritch Knights have more knobs and dials and I like turning knobs and dials. But I can also imagine having fun with a Champion, especially if I were playing Conan in a sword and sorcery environment.

However, if you add whole bunches of 4E-style AEDU powers to the Champion, I would have zero fun playing a Champion in a sword-and-sorcery environment and would quit that game in disgust at having my suspension of disbelief broken and the theme of the 5E fighter broken simultaneously. (That theme is "consistency". I can live with Action Surges and Second Wind because they're only 20% of the class, but if the class ever becomes 50% or 75% about limited-use resources it's no longer a fighter, it's something much less fun, a spellcaster by another name and with incoherent fluff.)

YMMV obviously.

P.S. I also don't mind making the fighter more magical. I mean, I like the Eldritch Knight, and that's a magical fighter. So is Onos T'oolan, he's a zombie neanderthal with a magical flint sword and weird magical powers. I wouldn't mind seeing fighters be more like the Knights Radiant from Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy either, although those guys are larger-than-D&D and wouldn't translate directly. What I would object to is someone trying to model Onos T'oolan but make him "non-magical" because "martials" need more awesome and "casters" already have plenty. That's incoherent. He's got powers because he's got magic via his warren. You can't have it both ways unless you invent some other power source like psionics or nanotechnology, and the latter is out of genre for D&D.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Okay, then in that case Pug definitely fits within the "heroic fantasy" genre for sure

That character was just not registering with me. So if finally looked it up, and, OK, maybe it's fantasy or maybe it's science-fantasy, but, it's interesting, because Fiest is on record as saying it was inspired by the EPT and D&D rpgs. I don't know how I've missed that all these years, but, it means:

1) I've got a /much/ better example of D&D influence genre than the bunch of FR and Dragonlance novels out there, and

2) As an example of D&D successfully emulating genre or being justified, by genre, in making casters overpowered, it's circular.

If I needed more examples

You really do. Both of protagonist casters displaying abilities far beyond those of D&D wizards in power, availability and versatility /and/ in that being so typical of the genre that D&D /had/ to make casters so overpowered to emulate the genre.

I'd look instead towards Steven Erikson (Anomander Rake and Lady Envy stand out as the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E wizards, and of course Dassem Ultor and Onos T'oolan are the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E fighters) and, oh, Rand al-Thor from Wheel of Time. I'd have to do some research to find specific examples for Rand since I didn't read the whole series, but the first book leads one to believe he can erase mountains and crack the continental crust, and I think he just gets bigger and badder as time goes on.

Actually abilities displayed would be most helpful in making your point. Not things that may have been implied. Nor things that are fairly common to genre, but dialed up to eleven in area effect (which, yeah, D&D is a comparatively small-scale game, it doesn't generally address either armies nor whipping armies out, wargame roots notwithstanding).

So the upshot is: claims that D&D wizards are always better than genre wizards while D&D fighters are always worse than genre fighters.

That's a slightly more extreme form of the claim I made. D&D caster pull abilities from all over the genre, and have access to /lots/ of those abilities, relative to characters of similar archetype, especially protagonists, in genre. D&D non-casters, OTOH, don't consistently pull the kinds of stunts corresponding archetypes in genre do, tending to fall short of them both in what they can do, and how broad a range of things they can do, individually. In addition, D&D tends to be pretty terrible at modeling genre takes on magic, because fire-and-forget casting is so damn rare outside of D&D. 'Always' is a really unnecessary qualifier, there. The fantasy genre ranges from what D&D would call 'low level' to mythic craziness D&D has only occasionally addressed (D&D Immortals, Epic tiers in 3e & 4e).

Turning armies to stone, for instance, is something a single D&D wizard couldn't do, but turning people to stone /is/ something they can do. The scale is different, the ability isn't. The way you rephrase the claim, the existence of 1st level wizards, alone, would 'disprove' it.

However, if you add whole bunches of 4E-style AEDU powers to the Champion, I would have zero fun playing a Champion in a sword-and-sorcery environment and would quit that game in disgust at having my suspension of disbelief broken

So, if I said that I'd have zero fun playing a Wizard who prepped spells and used bunches of slots to cast them, that would mean the wizard would have to be reduced to 0 cantrips?

No.

Balanced options should exist. Inferior options can even exist - they just should be presented honestly as such, like playing an Expert or Aristocrat in 3.x - and not be the only options for a given archetype.

P.S. I also don't mind making the fighter more magical.

Not the topic at hand. The fighter can already be magical, and multi-classing can make him more so. Magic is a very readily available in 5e, with 33 of 38 PC sub-classes having magical abilities of one sort or another, no class being without a magically-empowered archetype. It's balanced, player-agency-providing, choices for character archetypes that don't include such abilities that are lacking.

 

[Celtavian]

Okay, then in that case Pug definitely fits within the "heroic fantasy" genre for sure, and therefore blowing up planets is something that wizards can do in heroic fantasy but not in D&D. QED. If I needed more examples within your chosen genre-as-I-understand-it I couldn't pick Harry Potter (YA fantasy) or Niven's Warlock (since the Warlock is already a wizard when he becomes a protagonist and not a farm boy), so I'd look instead towards Steven Erikson (Anomander Rake and Lady Envy stand out as the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E wizards, and of course Dassem Ultor and Onos T'oolan are the most obvious examples of bigger-than-5E fighters) and, oh, Rand al-Thor from Wheel of Time. I'd have to do some research to find specific examples for Rand since I didn't read the whole series, but the first book leads one to believe he can erase mountains and crack the continental crust, and I think he just gets bigger and badder as time goes on.

So the upshot is: claims that D&D wizards are always better than genre wizards while D&D fighters are always worse than genre fighters are unfounded. Even if you restrict genre to only "heroic fantasy" as you've defined it above (note: you're using a different definition than the 5E DMG), there's still wide variation within genre, and D&D is not at the upper bound of that variation for wizards nor the lower bound for fighters. You could perhaps make an argument that Champion/Battlemaster fighters are uninteresting to you personally, and I would agree personally because Eldritch Knights have more knobs and dials and I like turning knobs and dials. But I can also imagine having fun with a Champion, especially if I were playing Conan in a sword and sorcery environment.

However, if you add whole bunches of 4E-style AEDU powers to the Champion, I would have zero fun playing a Champion in a sword-and-sorcery environment and would quit that game in disgust at having my suspension of disbelief broken and the theme of the 5E fighter broken simultaneously. (That theme is "consistency". I can live with Action Surges and Second Wind because they're only 20% of the class, but if the class ever becomes 50% or 75% about limited-use resources it's no longer a fighter, it's something much less fun, a spellcaster by another name and with incoherent fluff.)

YMMV obviously.

P.S. I also don't mind making the fighter more magical. I mean, I like the Eldritch Knight, and that's a magical fighter. So is Onos T'oolan, he's a zombie neanderthal with a magical flint sword and weird magical powers. I wouldn't mind seeing fighters be more like the Knights Radiant from Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy either, although those guys are larger-than-D&D and wouldn't translate directly. What I would object to is someone trying to model Onos T'oolan but make him "non-magical" because "martials" need more awesome and "casters" already have plenty. That's incoherent. He's got powers because he's got magic via his warren. You can't have it both ways unless you invent some other power source like psionics or nanotechnology, and the latter is out of genre for D&D.

Anomander Rake is awesome. I would love to be able to make that character. No way you could make it in a regular D&D campaign and hope to have any semblance of balance. Anomander Rake could fight gods in magical or physical battle. Many wizards in the sword and sorcery genre are also very capable warriors. Hard to capture in D&D.

 

[evilbob]

[MENTION=6786202]DaveDash[/MENTION]: Thanks for this thread; it's really nice to hear more about higher-level play and things to watch out for re: character builds, party builds, etc. I have a specific question for you (or anyone with lots of higher-level party play experience) and that is: how does a ranger stack up? People have said for a while that rangers were one of the weaker classes but then at low levels they tend to do very well due to sheer damage output. But I'm curious how they stack up at higher levels when other classes do more damage and their "exploration" skills are made nearly useless by the spells of other classes. I'm just wondering: do rangers really stack up or are they weak at higher levels as others have postulated?

 

[Celtavian]

Assuming they could find one to stand against, of course. There have always been a few things you could point to in D&D to get across the idea that high-level martial types were not limited to mundane, RL abilities. Surviving falls from great heights without debilitating injury, for instance.

Yet, somehow, those few big-numbers things never seem to open the door for much else. Not even a big number when you attempt a long jump.

Hey, if that 1 additional hp per level compared to a cleric means that much to you when playing a fighter...

Try coming up with that kind of Will save in 3.5, or WIS in 5e. AD&D fighters had remarkable saves at high level, but that was one of the few things 5e didn't roll back to.

Well, he might have been called that. But all we can really look at is what he actually did. Which, was a lot less that what a mid-level D&D wizard would do each adventuring day as a matter of course.

Though, of course, he did kill a Balrog. In hand to hand combat. Off screen.

How many martial characters went toe-to-toe with him? Maybe he'd've folded like the Witch King.

Sure. That's why they gathered armies and manipulated kings instead of blowing their enemies to bits.

And ganked by Eowen and a hobbit. The Witchking was prettymuch MacBeth. He received a prophecy of invincibility. It wasn't he was so powerful because he had 'witch' in his title, it was that Fate was saving him for Eowen to kill.

In most fantasy literature, yes, wizards are depicted as powerful - powerful villains. And heroes - mostly martial heroes - defeat them anyway, just like they defeat huge dragons and terrible demons.

When casters are protagonists, OTOH, their powers get dialed down, a lot. Or, failing that, every protagonist in the story becomes a caster.


When they're villains, or plot devices, sure. When they're the heroes, themselves, not so much.

And, again, if you look at the abilities displayed by any individual caster in genre, they're usually a lot less varied and powerful than what D&D wizards are playing around with. The more so when they're the heroes of the story, rather than some plot device character giving the hero a lift to hell or a villain trying to re-locate him there permanently.

So you don't see how the beatstick whose only choice is what order to kill the one or two monsters he'll chew through before the casters' spells annihilate the other 40, might not be making too big an impact?

D&D martial classes lack choices, let alone meaningful choices, compared to casters. It's that simple. You can't affect the story in a meaningful way without 'em. Otherwise you might as well be scenery.

Not true at all. What game have you been playing?

The barbarian in 3E was a beastly sick monster of a class in 3E. He looks damn good in this edition. What about the intelligence of the martial? If he's fighting a wizard, he doesn't show up with no means to do so. He brings a potion, finds a magic blade that gives him an edge, ambushes him, finds his own wizard allies. Do your martials do nothing?

None of the martials I've run have ever been scenery. They've been parts of every adventure, highly involved in the role-play and combat. A martial sat on the throne in our Kingmaker campaign wielding Armag's Blade. He had a blast. The warrior general Kord could intimidate giant's with a glare because his intimidation skill was so high. The archer was a mobile destroyer that could track an ant through the forest.

I don't know what you're looking for other than anime type of martials. Martials in D&D have done all kinds of amazing things that wizards can't accomplish as well or easily. Then there is the fact that the martials WANT to participate and can do so effectively. What do the wizards you run do? "I don't want you to use your social skills in this situation. I'm going to use charm because I don't like anyone else doing anything useful while I'm here. I have to do everything. You just stand around and wait to swing your sword when I tell you to do so. Thanks for coming."

Is that really your D&D experience? Is that how you run the game? Man, if that is, no wonder you are complaining. Sorry, those things don't come up in my game. I make sure martials have fun. I build adventures to highlight their abilities both in and out of combat. I give them lots of cool, unique magic items that make them dangerous to fight for anyone. I don't play the game like you do. I never have. Thus I don't have the same problems.

I like to follow quite a few genre conventions. Wizards are generally the mysterious, powerful types that pull out strange magic as needed to turn the tide of battle or overcome strange obstacles. Warriors are heroic, courageous, and capable of fighting hordes of creatures and powerful monsters in melee combat, usually armed with a legendary magical weapon. The masses fear and distrust wizards. They love and admire heroic warriors that do great deeds to protect them. Wizards end up in towers doing experiments and reading arcane tomes. Warriors get the chicks and have children in every village, town, and city. Martials are physically impressive specimens. Wizards are usually not (unless your Anomander Rake).

There's lot of benefits to being a martial. That's why they're as popular to play as they are. Some of it is a choice of style. I have friends that rarely touch casters because they can't picture themselves as one. They love the image of the muscular, powerful heroic warrior with the greatsword going toe to toe in battle until they are covered in blood and their enemy lays on the ground before them. There is something primal about that to a lot of players. And there are variations on that theme whether it the rogue slitting a throat or the otherworldly monk avoiding blows and destroying opponents with martial arts or the archer planting arrows in an enemy's heart before they can get within a hundred feet of him.

D&D does a good job of appealing to a wide array of genre conventions whether martials or casters. I use the system to let the players live out their current fantasy. I don't let a single caster player dominate everything because I'm such a poor DM I can't come up with ways to make non-casters shine. Whenever I hear the complaints, I think some players don't have DMs doing the same. That's too bad.