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

[Tony Vargas]

What do you mean by tradition they're keeping to then? Just the name of various concepts in the rules and the lore? Because modern D&D is in many ways fundamentally different than it was back in the TSR days.

Oh, 9 levels of spellcasting, 15 minute work days, fighters drooling and wizard ruling, 1st level being randomly lethal, etc...

...modern D&D has standardized on the d20 resolution mechanic, for good and ill, and has notably stripped restrictions/limitations off casting, but I would quibble as to whether those are fundamental differences.
OK, gold being nearly useless in 5e is a bit of a stretch from the game's treasure-hunting roots.

 

[Minigiant]

Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawkins are two of the most brilliant minds that ever lived and neither match the caliber of a first level wizard. What is extraordinary in our world barely measures a blip in D&D. Most of those athletes you listed are excellent in their chosen sports, but none of them would match a low level adventurer in D&D. The performers (wrestlers and Chan) even less so since they are acting. (Not to diminish their physical abilities, but play-fighting is not fighting and none of them are real martial artists.)

And it's completely acceptable that D&D is full of superheroes who easily top the greatest people of our world. What is extraordinary in real world Earth is pedestrian on Fearun.

The minimization of what we humans can do in our real world and the overall lower amount of knowledge or interests in some of the pursuits and activities of not popular with many in the D&D demographics has warped the perception and mechanics of D&D.

Mike Tyson, the old man he is today, if he punched a 25HD archmage would instantly drop them down like a pack of potatoes and cause rolling of saving throws. The gap between a trained warrior and some booklist scholar who on their best day dodged the knifes and axes of goblins would be great. But we minimize the gap both due to the lack of understanding in some or the lack of enjoyment of others

The actors of the wrestling industry are charged with lifting and spinning human beings off weights equal or more than theirs gracefully and dropping them onto wood or concrete floors with seriously injuring themselves or others on a weekly basis.

And D&D characters are stronger, faster, tougher, and more dextrous than them. All while being amazingly small, wise, and/or charming.

Which is why I said early on that martials didn't need to be supernatural. A martial at their real full potential with D&D's insane base stamina and lack of injuries would be insane.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The gap between a trained warrior and some booklist scholar who on their best day dodged the knifes and axes of goblins would be great. But we minimize the gap both due to the lack of understanding in some or the lack of enjoyment of others

So, this speaks to game balance and playability. We expect everyone to go on the same adventure, we don't expect the bard and the bookish wizard to stay back in town and schmooze the locals and do research while the barbarian and ranger go into the woods to hunt down orc patrols and the Paladin, Cleric & Rogue go down into the trap-and-undead-infested dungeon, even tho it might be sensible to form parties specifically for each mission. No, it's a game, and everyone should get to play.
BA comes down hard on that side of it. HD only varying in size, not number, with class, too. Keeping the numeric modifiers to the d20 within a moderate bound means that bookish scholar and the trained warrior can stand in the same battle without the former being instantly killed or the latter not breaking a sweat, the uncouth barbarian and the tactless wizard can sit at the negotiating table without ruining everything for the...Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock.
Nor has it only ever been 5e, way back in the stoned age of the '70s, EGG himself chose the "relatively short spoken spell" of Vance's Dying Earth to be the model of D&D casting so magic-users would be able to keep up with fighting men.

 

[Scribe]

Mike Tyson, the old man he is today, if he punched a 25HD archmages would instantly drop them down like a pack of potatoes and cause rolling of saving throws.

lol this is absolutely true.

 

[NotAYakk]

A level 5 fighter in full gear can fight and beat a dozen trained soldiers at point blank range.

Battlemaster, duelist, 18 str 14 con, plate, shield, PAM. 20 AC, +6 to hit, 2d6+1d4+18 (27.5) dpr plus maneuvers, 44 hp+10.5 second wind.

Against guards, 16 AC 11 hp 5.5 dpr at +3 to hit.

Guard has 10% hit 5% crit for .2*4.5+.15*1 --- it takes an average of 52 attacks to drop our battlemaster.

1d6+6 has a 1/3 chance to one-hit a guard, 100% chance to two-hit. Crits, or use of a BM damage die, have a 1/6 chance to not kill a guard. 1d4+6 cannot one-hit unless you use a BM die, but will kill a wounded guard.

It ends up with a bit over 1 guard killed per round (of which 0.15 is from bonus action) Action surge is about 0.85 dead guards. Give or take.

BM dice can turn .8 of a miss into a hit (worth 0.4 dead guards), grant a ripost (worth about 0.4 dead guards), boost damage (worth about 0.4 dead guards) on a non-crit or a crit (worth 0.15 dead guards because guard already dead).

Burning 1 die per action is easy.

So 2.5 guards dead round 1, followed by 1.4 guards for 2 rounds, then about 1 guard per round. After 3 rounds 5.3 guards are dead, having done about 9 damage to the fighter.

If we have N+5 guards, they last N+3 rounds against our fighter, doing N*3+9+(N+1)N/2 damage to the battlemaster.

Solving for 50 we get:
50=3N+9+N^2/2+N/2
N^2+7N+12.25=103.25
(N+3.5)^2=103.25
N+3.5=10.16
N=6.66
So 12 guards is an even fight for our level 5 fighter in mundane gear.

By level 11 the PC has a +1 weapon and shield, 16 con and 20 strength and 3 attacks. Swings are almost twice as deadly (chance to kill per swing) and the fighter gets 50% more of them. The fighter has 119.5 HP budget, a bit more than double as well. The attackers deal 1/3 less damage. And more BM dice.

Doubling number of foes makes 4x damage taken. But fighter is 3x as durable and kills almost 3x as many guards per round; so 36 soldiers at once (all in melee range!) is an even fight.

Make the foes queue up and only engage a dozen at a time (!) and the fighter can handle 100 soldiers in an even fight.

...

Is this supernatural? No mortal person could fight 100 trained soldiers like that.

And by 20 we get another massive jump in power. 4 hits, basically 100% kill and accuracy, per round. Each attacker does almost 0 damage per swing. Two action surges. More efficient uses of BM dice.

And if we optimize it gets worse.

Treating this as a mundane fighter is such a difficult to rationalize choice.

 

[Minigiant]

So, this speaks to game balance and playability. We expect everyone to go on the same adventure, we don't expect the bard and the bookish wizard to stay back in town and schmooze the locals and do research while the barbarian and ranger go into the woods to hunt down orc patrols and the Paladin, Cleric & Rogue go down into the trap-and-undead-infested dungeon, even tho it might be sensible to form parties specifically for each mission. No, it's a game, and everyone should get to play.
BA comes down hard on that side of it. HD only varying in size, not number, with class, too. Keeping the numeric modifiers to the d20 within a moderate bound means that bookish scholar and the trained warrior can stand in the same battle without the former being instantly killed or the latter not breaking a sweat, the uncouth barbarian and the tactless wizard can sit at the negotiating table without ruining everything for the...Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock.
Nor has it only ever been 5e, way back in the stoned age of the '70s, EGG himself chose the "relatively short spoken spell" of Vance's Dying Earth to be the model of D&D casting so magic-users would be able to keep up with fighting men.

I think it's less about game balance and sitting out and more about the gap between.

The Fighter used to have double the base HP and Attack modifier of the untrained of the same level. Even in old school terms,the mundane martial should have Expertise with Attack roll, adding double their proficiency modifier with weapon attack.

Basically the Precision attack should be on every martial attack with warriors having the skill to find the unguarded neck of a foe with increasing experience.

And Mike Tyson punches for 25d6+Str damage.

 

[Voadam]

The Fighter used to have double the base HP and Attack modifier of the untrained of the same level. Even in old school terms,the mundane martial should have Expertise with Attack roll, adding double their proficiency modifier with weapon attack.

The paladin had the same martial advantages as the fighter in 1e. 1e paladins were supernatural martials. So what you describe was a martial versus non martial split, not a mundane martial compared to others split.

It was only in 2e that you had single class fighters being the only ones to be able to get weapon specialization while paladins and rangers and multiclass fighters did not (and then there were work arounds for some non-fighters later as sourcebooks were developed). Weapon specialization with bonus attacks, hit bonus, and damage bonus was a decent mundane martial only benefit in 2e.

The old school warrior versus others split on attacks mostly meant that while fighter types stood out in combat, it was mostly in outshining thieves who thought backstab and blades meant they could do melee. Heavy armor clerics could tank even with slightly lower than fighter HD, THAC0, and blunt weapons that did less damage. They could still decently front line it and do magic on top of that in return for silver medalling to fighters on physical attacks and hp. Magic users were always back line special effects artillery who avoided melee combat like the plague.

Thieves were basically only slightly better at physical combat than MUs with no spells, tough to pull off backstab, and leather armor, usually better off as back line missile fire than as an attempt at a Gray Mouser mobile fencer type.

 

[ECMO3]

It was only in 2e that you had single class fighters being the only ones to be able to get weapon specialization while paladins and rangers and multiclass fighters did not (and then there were work arounds for some non-fighters later as sourcebooks were developed). Weapon specialization with bonus attacks, hit bonus, and damage bonus was a decent mundane martial only benefit in 2e.

You had it in AD&D 1E too. Single-class fighters (and Rangers) could get weapon specialization. Others, including Paladins, Barbarians and Cavaliers and anyone who multiclassed could not.

Paladins and Cavaliers got a different mechanich that gave them more attacks, increased their hit but not damage, while also not giving up weapon proficiencies.

Dual class fighters or Rangers could have specialization though.

 

[ECMO3]

I think it's less about game balance and sitting out and more about the gap between.

The gap between classes is a completely different discussion. To start with this presumes that the gap is a bad thing, something many do not agree with. But even if the gap is a problem, there are numerous methods available to "fix" it and most of them do not involve changing the fighter mechanics at all.

I think if we are discussing whether or not the fighters (or other martials) should be mundane, we need to look at it through what that class should do, not through what other classes can do.

Saying fighters should not be mundane because of a gap with casters really takes the discussion completely off the rails and makes it about game balance and not what classes should be.

 

[Maxperson]

And even if he could, it would be wrong, because teleportation exists. And mass/energy is not conserved. And lightning bolts travel at the same speed as fireballs.... etc...

Not necessarily. That magic can break the laws doesn't mean that the laws don't exist naturally. Natural lightning could be a zillion times faster than magic lightning. And we know that teleportation accesses other dimensions, so it doesn't even violate the law if it exists, because the other dimension might have different laws.