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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8315237" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You touch on this a bit in a later post, but it's worth calling out here: What counts as "similar mechanics"? Because I find that, much of the time, "similar mechanics" is so incredibly broad that it starts to sound like code for "mechanics that actually work and achieve things."I don't think you are personally committing this error, given the quotes around "magic," but I really, really, really, really wish the D&D community as a whole would stop conflating ANYTHING "supernatural" with "magic." Not even 3e did that! 3e explicitly says that "Extraordinary" abilities are NOT magical, but CAN break the laws of physics. (It's really unfortunate, TBH, that they used the term "supernatural" for effects that ARE magical but aren't specifically spells. Because "magic" is NOT the end-all, be-all of supernatural phenomena!)Fighters ARE supernatural. Period. They exceed what is physically possible, sometimes impressively so. They should be allowed to do things that are by 3e's terms "Extraordinary"--non-magical but potentially physics-defying. If people could just let that ONE thing go, this whole problem could be solved. But caster fans want to completely and totally own ANYTHING supernatural, and that permanently ghettoizes anyone who isn't a caster.Cynically: You bet your britches they'd complain. And they'd keep complaining until the mechanic has been nerfed so hard, it's no longer effective. Because "similar mechanic" sounds more and more like "effective mechanic" every single day.Optimistically: If it's explained and grounded, and the playerbase is encouraged to accept Extraordinary things (in 3e terms) from non-caster characters, then it might be workable.Sounds like a starting point. The devil, as always, will be in the details. Feats were supposed to be bespoke packages of useful effects, and hey, Fighters got zillions of them! Look how that turned out.I have become deeply disillusioned by how much the latter group outweighs the former in terms of influence how D&D gets designed. They may only be a subset, but they control the narrative in many ways--sometimes literally. Remember, after all, that Heinsoo explicitly said that he had to keep removing small but consistent efforts from the design team to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090603102932/http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4spot/20090313" target="_blank">make the Wizard the best class</a> in the PHB. (Have to use an archive link because WotC deleted the original in one of the two or three website purges they've gone through.) He admitted he'd probably overcorrected slightly, but that it was necessary to make sure non-Wizards were actually on par.Well, see, that's what I'm asking. It sounds very much to me like spellcaster fans would not accept there being Pyromancer and Illusionist as classes (or as Wizard subclasses, or whatever) who aren't able to nick the powerful spells from one another. So...if we cannot meet the requirement you've presented, does that make this design problem impossible to solve?Good luck getting Wizard fans to let go of being able to cast both invisibility and fireball.So, as I said above, this is kind of a problem. Because it means that "similar mechanic" doesn't actually have anything to do with the resource schedule (despite people claiming this back in the 4e days). It doesn't have anything to do with the specific consequences of the mechanic (because, for example, 4e didn't let Fighters have fire-keyword powers, but it was still a problem). And it doesn't have anything to do with the resolution procedure, because 5e offers Fighters abilities that induce saves and Wizards spells that use attack rolls, and that's gone over with hardly a ripple.At this point, it really, truly seems like the only thing about these mechanics that is "similar" is that Wizard mechanics achieve a function, so Fighter mechanics can't be allowed to do that. But that's precisely equivalent to saying that Fighters aren't allowed to play the same game as Wizards, because Wizards will always be able to roll skill checks and do all the other things that don't automatically achieve some function.Wizards can make things happen. Both Fighters and Wizards can try to make something happen. Wizards are, therefore, more powerful than Fighters. QED.Unless you have a proposal for how to address this fundamental problem?This is absolutely a problem, yes. Skills aren't just "you can try it," they're also "first you must sell me on it." Two chances to have your efforts negated.How many casters would just accept it if a DM simply said, "No, sorry, you can't cast that spell right now. It's not an antimagic field or anything. It just doesn't make sense to me that you'd be able to cast that spell right now, so you can't." They'd throw a fit!People keep saying this. I have yet to see a game where it actually works. So, if that's what you'd like? Gimme structures. Examples. Do the work to show that you can have "I'm allowed to just declare this happens" for spells only, while ANYONE, spellcaster or not, has access to things that are "flexible and always available."Unless you're proposing to deny spellcasters access to that? That could be interesting. My disillusionment with the opinions of caster fans tells me that they'd never accept it, but it would at least be a different direction than most people who propose "but martials can just have always-available things!"And for Goodness' sake, please tell me you'd at least allow reliable, purely non-magical healing, so that the spellcasters don't have the team by the short and curlies when it comes to deciding when people rest. Because that's literally letting the fox decide who gets to enter the henhouse, and is a BIG part of the problem with nearly every "casters are AWESOME, but only in bursts, while non-casters are ordinary but reliable." Being reliable doesn't matter when the person who decides whether you bleed out on the floor or not is also the person deciding how much time you're permitted to spend being reliable.Or, to turn that around the other way: How do you stop the spellcasters from setting the pace of the game, and thus being BOTH awesome AND reliable? Because that's where this design has always ended up. It happened in 3e, and it's currently an ongoing design issue in 5e, as admitted by Crawford back in that interview regarding the "Feature Variants" UA (that became official rules in Tasha's).I appreciate that Sly Flourish notes, here, how much WotC has misused the Advantage mechanic (which...is literally exactly what I predicted during the playtest, and no, I will never stop criticizing WotC for this because it was so easily visible all the way back then.)As with most things of this nature, I only really have three problems with this:(1) I find that the vast majority of DMs, even friendly ones, are uncomfortable setting DCs that players will actually think are worth pursuing. Whatever the reason, despite many many many DMs claiming that they want their players to try stunts and do awesome moves and such, when it comes to actually supporting those things with rules....they almost always tend to rule so deeply conservatively that players quickly learn not to bother.(2) It's a check to make a check to see if something happens. That's...not great. Like, I get that the whole point here is to spice up the action, rather than using something relatively dull. But "a chance to have a chance to do something" is bad, generally speaking. "A chance to have a chance to do something, OR to suffer a bad consequence" is even worse. The intent is to support cool choices with a meaningful benefit, but even with an actually-in-practice favorable DM who WANTS to see these things succeed, the actual positive impact is thinned purely because of iterative probability.(3) Anyone can do it. You're not fixing the problem, because casters can do stunts just as easily as non-casters. Heck, they may do them more easily, because (only considering 5e here, not your proposed new system stuff) spellcasters can give themselves advantage on checks (enhance ability) and other buffs that make this sort of thing much easier. Without doing something to at least limit caster entry into this kind of rule, you haven't addressed the disparity; you've pushed the Fighter up, but you've pushed the Wizard up by just as much.yeah....again, as with the above, I just have become disillusioned with DMs' actual ability to do this. Oh, almost all of them will TALK about it. And they'll talk about how their Fighters don't seem to be unhappy etc. etc. But when I get real hard data, I still see the pattern. I still see the casters having that leg up.IMO, it's not that Fighter fans are happy with their lot. It's that they've grown so used to it, they only complain when things get horrendously out of hand.Yeah, that's...pretty much where I'm at too, and it makes me extremely, extremely sad.God I hope so, but it's a pretty thin hope. Strixhaven is super cool thematically though (even though I'd have to be an exchange student between Lorehold, Silverquill, and Quandrix. I'm a physicist and philosopher by training, albeit nowhere near as experienced as several active members of this forum!)He has spoken for himself, so I don't mean to put words in his mouth. But my general experience from DMs who speak of "requiring people to play their skills" is that it means the player must intentionally do specifically dangerous things (low Wis), must be unable to meaningfully reason or remember (low Int), or must be  not merely unconvincing but generate active hostility with their behavior (low Cha).It's usually used by people who think that having a -1 Wisdom modifier means being suicidally impulsive and having a -1 Int modifier means the character should have a diagnosable mental disability.As someone who is generally fairly smart, but often plays characters who value stats other than Intelligence? Yes, it's extremely frustrating to be told "you can't suggest that idea to the group out-of-character, because your character wouldn't be able to come up with it.""Low intelligence" of the kind described is actually extremely common, though. Remember that IQ scores are normed to 100 with a standard deviation of 15. This means that approximately one in six people is at least a full standard deviation below the mean--or, in other words,  you've got a pretty good chance of at least one of the people at any given D&D table being there.You can quite easily have someone who can come up with a good plan, but has minimal formal education and a terrible memory. Consider people like Michael Faraday, who dropped out of the equivalent of primary school, but was one of the foremost experimental physicists of his day. Highly, highly intelligent man--but in D&D terms he might not even have cracked +1 modifier.This is why it frustrates me as much as it does when a DM tells me my character couldn't possibly have come up with an idea, because he's too dumb. If we can roleplay it out, why couldn't I? It's a load of hooey and if it happens too much, I am willing to walk away from the table over it.In general, 4e could be fairly forgiving, but you usually had to work for it, and there were always tradeoffs. E.g., I tend to play Dragonborn Paladins, who don't get much out of Intelligence or Dexterity. While most suggest dumping Int and having a low but positive Dex mod, I usually did the reverse. I would also take advantage of Backgrounds, Themes, feats, and my racial +2 to History to get a respectably high total History skill, despite being "only slightly above average" intelligence. But because of this, my characters tended to be really really bad at Dexterity skills--heavy armor, negative Dex modifier, and no training meant if I had to roll Stealth or Acrobatics, I might have a -5 modifier (not counting the half-level bonus that applies to almost all D20 rolls), more or less equivalent to bumping up "easy" difficulty to "hard," and "moderate" difficulty to "nigh impossible."So...yeah. 4e was forgiving in one sense, and not forgiving in another. It absolutely supported investing into being good at some specific thing, even if your ability scores didn't. But doing so usually meant sacrifices elsewhere, often significant ones.</blockquote>

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