D&D 5E So what's exactly wrong with the fighter?

[Minigiant]

One thing people have to come to terms with is that D&D is crazy dangerous. Many classic hero were not 100% human or were decked out with magic items or magic.

The big monsters of the Monster Manual would wreck a 100% normal fightrr. Most games and stories have to give them an edge. Crazy Damage. Overpowered item. A mythical parent. Or disassociated mechanics.

You ain't punking a adult red dragon in standard armor and a mass produced sword.

 

[Hussar]

Swimming upthread a bit for something that stuck out to me.

I'm afraid not.

People who know multiple styles of martial arts actually blend them together all the time unless they are doing something officially for that particular martial art.

/snip
I cannot suddenly know a different martial style because I warm up differently.

But, this is something I don't understand. Why are you the guardians of what is plausible. Others have said that this is plausible to them. The explanation is good enough, for them. So, considering you don't want a more complex fighter at all, don't want to play the class and most likely won't use it in your game, why do you care what the explanation is? What difference does it make to you?

Why does a class you don't want to play have to satisfy your criteria for plausibility? Why should such a class be designed with your tastes in mind at all?

 

[Ashkelon]

One thing people have to come to terms with is that D&D is crazy dangerous. Many classic hero were not 100% human or were decked out with magic items or magic.

The big monsters of the Monster Manual would wreck a 100% normal fightrr. Most games and stories have to give them an edge. Crazy Damage. Overpowered item. A mythical parent. Or disassociated mechanics.

You ain't punking a adult red dragon in standard armor and a mass produced sword.

Actually, an adult red dragon is one of the few things a 5e fighter could potentially solo. Not a strength based fighter, but a crossbow expert sharpshooter could cause some serious hurt with 2 rounds of action surge, great range, and battlemaster maneuvers.

 

[Minigiant]

Actually, an adult red dragon is one of the few things a 5e fighter could potentially solo. Not a strength based fighter, but a crossbow expert sharpshooter could cause some serious hurt with 2 rounds of action surge, great range, and battlemaster maneuvers.

I mentioned that
Crazy damage
OP items
God parent
Or not human

 

[Tony Vargas]

I do not think the fighter has been short-changed. He could use some more skills for my tastes.

That'd be short-changed on skills.

If a class casts spells, it's not a martial class even if its damage comes primarily from martial damage as in having to use a weapon to do it. Hmm. I don't agree with that. Paladins and rangers have always been martial classes with a limited spell selection intended to imitate some of the magical capabilities the archetype is based on.

I suppose you'd want to use 'mundane," then, with it's connotation of mediocrity? We could just say non-magic-using, clumsy though it is. In any case, there are 5 such builds in 5e, and they're still supposed to represent heroic fantasy archetypes (once you're out of Apprentice Tier, anyway).

You forget that they must carefully choose those memorized slots. Before a wizard could fill each spell slot with a different spell. He often obtained magic items like bracers of defense to eliminate his need to take mage armor. He might grab a few scrolls to fill in other spells. He can't do that in this edition.

Bracers of defense certainly exist in this edition. And, the availability of a single spell is actually higher. You don't have to fill multiple slots with the same spell to keep it available after casting it, because you're casting spontaneously, now. As long as you have your top-level slot left, every spell you prepared is available to cast.

It really wasn't very viable in 3rd edition. Skill points too low. Not a cross class skill in 3E. Then there was the negative modifier to Stealth for wearing armor. I'm including 3E. A dex-based stealth fighter in 3E often wasn't optimal like it is in 5E.

The highest ACs, including having a better, critically-important Touch AC, were available with relatively light armor (Celestial Mail being just ridiculous that way), so very high DEX could be pretty optimal. But, yes, skill points killed the 3e fighter's effectiveness at almost anything that didn't reference his BAB. One of the good things Pathfinder added was the BAB-based combat maneuver bonus.

You mean in breadth of power? The 5E fighters breadth of power is less than the wizard, but better than pass editions. Proficiencies were weak in 2E.

They're not exactly kick-ass in 5e, but yeah, everyone has better access to non-class/non-combat proficiencies via Backgrounds. That doesn't help the fighter class relative to other classes...

Part of the reason the fighter's breadth of power is better is because the wizard's breadth of power is less as well.

Even were that true, I'm not sure it helps much. The breadth of power for an individual D&D wizard is still greater than displayed by individual magic-using archetypes in genre and the D&D fighter's breadth of power is still less than that displayed by corresponding archetypes in genre. And, it's only true if you compare the 5e wizard to it's incarnations in the worst-balanced levels and editions of the game's past. Of course, reigning in the power of wizards and expanding that of fighters would be progress, if 5e had done so relative to all past editions - but it didn't.

Yes. 4E was the most balanced edition.

And that's the real problem with trying to portray the 5e fighter as any better off or the 5e wizard or other casters as any more limited. It's only true if you compare them selectively to editions that failed to balance them in the past. Compare to 4e, and the fighter has lost options and casters gained, and not be a small margin - though, even in 4e, casters, particularly the wizard, still had more options than martial characters.

This isn't really an edition v edition issue, it's a class issue, and every edition is 'guilty.'

Spotlight balance is necessary in any game like D&D

It's a matter of degree. The better-balanced the system, the less need there is for the DM to distort the campaign to force spotlight balance. You're right that there almost always will be some such need, though. Players are different, both in system-mastery skills and in assertiveness. DMs vary in how precisely they want to assure equal-participation among their players, too.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If the game rules have a sentence or two in them to tell you how a power rationalizes into the fiction then it's "associated", but if they don't have said sentences, then it's disassociated?

It's worse than that, really. 4e did have a sidebar that gave in-fiction rationalizations for powers (including martial exploits) having the encounter or daily limit. When defending his coining of 'Dissociated Mechanics,' the Alexandrian dismissed that rationalization, inserted a different one (favored by some vocal 4vengers, but not actually in the PH), and judged /that/ 'dissociated.'

I don't really want to get into when the term was coined or why, but I struggle to understand how it's a legitimate criticism of any game mechanics. Especially when one of the strongest defensive arguments for 5e is "you're the GM, make it work/figure it out", why doesn't the same apply to "disassociated" mechanics?

I suppose for the same reason that Rule-0 as a defense of broken mechanics got hammered with the "Oberoni Fallacy." 5e's attitude of DM Empowerment, though, seems like it sidesteps that issue. It's just so up-front about it. It's not just "Rule 0: the DM can change the rules," it's built into the most basic explanations of the system that the DM is exercising his judgement all the time.

Whatever the fighter's flaws are, they don't appear to be significant enough to discourage many people from playing them. So it's prolly fine.

The fighter was long the only class that modeled the most common heroic fantasy archetypes, so of course people play it. It's also pushed as the simplistic training-wheels class...

BTW I only remember Perseus having a shield from Athena and some kind of magic wallet for food or something. Am I forgetting others? Jack the Giant Killer might be a better example of someone with lots of magic items: he had magic sword, a cloak of invisibility, shoes of swiftness, a cap of knowledge, and a pouch of holding (essentially). He might be the only hero in all of literature who would actually exceed 5E's attunement ceiling, by one item.

Perseus had a number of items given to him by the Gods at the direction of Zeus. A magic shield, a sword that could cut through the scales of a gorgon, Hermes's winged sandals for flight & cap for invisibility, and a bag of holding to put Medusa's head in. And he was instructed on exactly what to with those items. Very much an allegorical "good boys do what they're told" hero, Perseus.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

HP are actually one of the most disassociated mechanics ever invented. You PC should not have a clue what they are, but the player does, and often makes decisions based on the amount of HP left.

There's a difference between dissociation and abstraction. Characters are aware of the variables that HP abstracts into a single number: they know when they've been exhausted, battered, and wounded, and can make decisions accordingly.

In fact, the abstraction avoids some dissociation that might otherwise be present. If HP represented purely "plot armor", how many times you could dodge an attack before the next one connects and drops you, then it would be dissociated for a player to know "I can dodge five attacks but not six." And if it represented purely physical toughness, how many times you could get stabbed before the next one drops you, then it would have the same problem and produce some ridiculous mental images to boot. By being vague about what's going on, it actually improves plausibility while keeping the math simple.

Really, only a few people seem to dislike disassociated mechanics, and they aren't even equal in their treatment of them. What they generally mean is they don't like such mechanics on martial warriors. They are perfectly fine with such mechanics on spellcasters or other complex PCs. They are perfectly fine with such mechanics that are ingrained parts of the system (saves and HP). It is only when agency is given to martial PCs that a these people get up in arms about disassociated mechanics.

Do you really see any value in spending your time psychoanalyzing a strawman?

 

[Ashkelon]

There's a difference between dissociation and abstraction. Characters are aware of the variables that HP abstracts into a single number: they know when they've been exhausted, battered, and wounded, and can make decisions accordingly.

In fact, the abstraction avoids some dissociation that might otherwise be present. If HP represented purely "plot armor", how many times you could dodge an attack before the next one connects and drops you, then it would be dissociated for a player to know "I can dodge five attacks but not six."

Players do know that though. I have seen them make decisions based off this knowledge before. Like "Oh, the ogre only deals 13 damage on average and I have 45 HP, so I can hold it off for at least 3 rounds." That is entirely disassociated.

And if it represented purely physical toughness, how many times you could get stabbed before the next one drops you, then it would have the same problem and produce some ridiculous mental images to boot. By being vague about what's going on, it actually improves plausibility while keeping the math simple.

Being vague doesn't make it any less disassociated though. I get that some people can choose not to see HP as disassociated, but they are no more or no less disassociated than any of the other mechanics being discussed in this thread.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Players do know that though. I have seen them make decisions based off this knowledge before. Like "Oh, the ogre only deals 13 damage on average and I have 45 HP, so I can hold it off for at least 3 rounds." That is entirely disassociated.

If he's got that information just by reading the Monster Manual, that's a metagaming problem, of course. But don't you think an experienced adventurer might be able to size up his enemy, evaluate his own fighting condition, and come to a similar conclusion? Boxers can estimate how many rounds they can go against a tough opponent. It's not that they know exactly how many punches they can dodge and how many punches they can take; it's that they've got a general idea of their own endurance. Which is exactly what HP is.

Being vague doesn't make it any less disassociated though. I get that some people can choose not to see HP as disassociated, but they are no more or no less disassociated than any of the other mechanics being discussed in this thread.

They are less dissociated than the inspiration mechanic, or the "Fence" example I gave earlier, or the aspect system in Fate, because they inform the player's decision making in the same way they inform the character's decision making: "I'm feeling fresh, I can fight" or "I'm pretty beat up, maybe I should back off".

 

[Tony Vargas]

There's a difference between dissociation and abstraction. Characters are aware of the variables that HP abstracts into a single number: they know when they've been exhausted, battered, and wounded, and can make decisions accordingly.

Can they know they're luck's run out? The gods have abandoned them? That they won't be able to just-barely dodge that next attack?

Not really. And, in a way, that makes hps a great mechanic, because it does capture a genre element that's otherwise difficult: 'plot armor.'

Being vague doesn't make it any less disassociated though. I get that some people can choose not to see HP as disassociated, but they are no more or no less disassociated than any of the other mechanics being discussed in this thread.

Ultimately dissociation exists (if it exists at all) in the mind of the player complaining about it, not the mechanic being blamed for it.