D&D 5E Should martial characters be mundane or supernatural?

[Oofta]

I am not talking about rarity

Then what? All PCs have roughly equivalent magic items appropriate to what they find useful.

 

[Minigiant]

Then what? All PCs have roughly equivalent magic items appropriate to what they find useful.

You have to read the comment I responded to.

@Tony Vargas said

"a certain level the caster class gets to take out a whole encounter's worth of enemies in one action, at that same level, the martial class gets a magic item that allows something similar"

So if the caster has fireball, the martial gets a sword of slashball

There is no sword of slashball.

If there were, a caster could pick up and attune to the sword of slashball via their race, subclass, feat, and now a bastion.

You would have to ban the caster from using swords OR make the sword of slashball martial class only.

 

[Maxperson]

Which, quite frankly I don't want for D&D. Feels like an entirely different kind of game, which is neither good nor bad.

I know everybody brings up wish, but I don't remember the last time I saw anyone actually cast it. I've seen Meteor Storm a handful of times, but that's pretty situational.

I've seen more Wishes than Meteor Swarms, but then groups I run and play in go to high level in most campaigns.

These debates almost make me want to make a mundane PC who doesn't fight that well, but whose exercise regimen allows him to use Magic Mundane Missile and make folks go to Sleep, and at high levels he will be able to exercise his way into granting Wishes. He can do 100 sit-ups, 100 push -ups, 100 quats and then a 10km run. A purely mundane PC, right?

 

[Corinnguard]

My point was that magic items are involved.

You make it sound like magic items are an automatic given. Not every homebrewed or pre-made adventure a party is run through is going to have them. And even when the party does come across them, not all of them are going to be something that is usable by a martial character.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Sure, but if he's chopping mountains in half with a sword stroke in order to match Wish, then he's engaging in a supernatural act. That is never going to be mundane. It's okay if he trained highly through mundane means and transcended, but he did transcend into the supernatural.

Sure, but I already said in a previous post that I think that high level martials (T3+) ought to be supernatural.

That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be inherently supernatural. The traditional fighter is kind of like Iron Man, where their power comes from their gear (I would prefer martials to be inherently supernatural at high levels, but that's just my personal preference). However, if they're an Iron Man type, then I think that needs to be baked into the class in some way. Tony Stark without his gadgets is smart, charismatic and rich, but he's not a 20th level character in any meaningful sense. With his gadgets, he can keep up with Dr Strange.

Some DMs will give out bespoke magic items, some just roll on random tables, and some give few to no magic items. A wizard might enjoy finding new spells, but they gain 2 automatically every level, which is sufficient even if they never find a single spell. A martial is guaranteed 0 magic items, despite being quite reliant on them at high levels in the game's current configuration.

 

[Minigiant]

You make it sound like magic items are an automatic given. Not every homebrewed or pre-made adventure a party is run through is going to have them. And even when the party does come across them, not all of them are going to be something that is usable by a martial character.

Im not saying magic items are given

I'm saying the question of
"Should martial characters be mundane or supernatural?"

is really

"Are magic items assumed or optional?"

 

[Scribe]

You would have to ban the caster from using swords OR make the sword of slashball martial class only.

One of the failures of 5e is the lack of attack progressions.

Either way, simple fix.

Must be Class X of Level Y to attune.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think even in Tier 1 they kinda start as mystic. Barbarians getting stronger when angry is for example kinda mystic. Fighters can probably also get angry and full of adrenaline in a fight, but it doesn't make them somehow twice as durable as normal. Also magic users already use spells on Tier 1, so they are definitely mystical already, the martials should be on a same level. At least they should be much stronger than a normal NPC soldier that just grabbed a knife and got a bit of a base training. I mean there is a reason why not everybody runs around looting dungeons.

The explanation for it doesn't really matter. Beowulf was already put as an example here - There is no explanation why Beowolf is able to do his heroic deeds. A lot of hero mythologies are not having explanations, why would we need it here. IMO DnD leans heavily in this heroic fantasy. Sure you can play a grim dark "realistic" campaign, but here the whole framework kinda falls apart.

I'm not interested in "heroic fantasy". I'm interested in an imaginary world that, outside of explicit supernatural factors, operates more or less with Earth physics (with some wiggle room for action movie stuff). The early game basically allowed for this if you wanted it too, and so do many OSR variants. The closest thing in 5e that does what I want is Level Up, which is why I strongly support it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which, quite frankly I don't want for D&D. Feels like an entirely different kind of game, which is neither good nor bad.

I know everybody brings up wish, but I don't remember the last time I saw anyone actually cast it. I've seen Meteor Storm a handful of times, but that's pretty situational.

It's easier to push your point of view by using extremes and pretending there isn't a spectrum.

 

[Oofta]

You have to read the comment I responded to.

@Tony Vargas said

"a certain level the caster class gets to take out a whole encounter's worth of enemies in one action, at that same level, the martial class gets a magic item that allows something similar"

So if the caster has fireball, the martial gets a sword of slashball

There is no sword of slashball.

If there were, a caster could pick up and attune to the sword of slashball via their race, subclass, feat, and now a bastion.

You would have to ban the caster from using swords OR make the sword of slashball martial class only.

That's ... going back pretty far. On the other hand, taking out a group of enemies at once tends to be A) situational B) cool now and then but the fighter still wins on DPR over the long run. Unless of course you set up the game to have 5MWD combined with all enemies appearing in fireball formation combined with fireball never having any detrimental effects like setting the town on fire.