D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Umbran]

Most fantasy knight don't have magic.

Said as if anyone had done a comprehensive survey of fantasy fiction to determine this.

That's the whole problem.

With respect, that's reductive to the point of being un-actionable. Having seen so many of these arguments over the decades (yes, decades - this is an old axe grinding here), there are many aspects to the "problem", and that knights in fiction don't use magic is only one piece of it.

Until you are willing to accept that, so long as you go forward with this over-simplified problem statement, you will get precisely nowhere.

If perpetually arguing (remember - decades) is sufficient, then this reduction is a reasonable choice. If not, the reductive approach is highly flawed.

People wanted a class feature or class archetype to make up for boosting Cha or Int or Wis over Con or Dex for your nonmagical warrior.

Oh, "people" have wanted far more than that. There's 40 pages here, and again decades of argument before. It isn't all over one class feature.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I did not enjoy NPCs being built like PCs; especially not the NPC classes, which seemed to exist to punish the NPCs for being created.

 

[payn]

Quick question: Are you a player or a DM mostly? As a player I see the appeal. As a DM there's no way in hell I'm doing anything close to that for every named NPC. Making a rogue or high level wizard I'm going to be playing for months is tedious enough as a player.

Both. I have a pile of templates and Paizo put out a few NPC codexes that made this pretty simple and easy. Though, yes, if you are building them every single time you need one, it can be too much. Despite being my favorite edition to date, I can also admit 3E is harder to GM than many of the editions.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Most fantasy knight don't have magic.

Knight narrows the archetype, and definitely includes Paladin-type figures like Lancelot and Galahad, who certainly didn't cast spell, but did derive power from faith and a state of Divine Grace. There's not generally a big distinction between Divine and Arcane magic in D&D, tho, which hurts a bit when emulating such characters.

People wanted a class feature or class archetype to make up for boosting Cha or Int or Wis over Con or Dex for your nonmagical warrior.

DEX primary with some useful mental stats could be nice, too, for all your three musketeer types.

TBH, the Fantasy genre was so dominated for a while by REH and Tolkien (by their legacies, anyway), that it can be a bit of a stretch to think about the ol' Knight in Shinning Armor of earllier fairytale fantasy, folklore, (& even history, when history has been sufficiently bowdlerized) as a legit archetype.
Early on D&D made armor a powerful/important defense in combat, and, to 'balance' it, emphasized it's disadvantages: you can't go around wearing it 24/7 like in Excalibur(1981), it slows you down almost comically, you'll drown if you go swimming in it, etc... some fairly mundane, contrary to genre limitations, too (was originally a wargame, remember, those leaned into realism a bit). Not that different from how magic was made powerful, but heavily restricted.
Ironically, the disadvantages of heavy armor haven't changed greatly, and adequate-high AC has become fairly easy to obtain without it, while the restrictions on casting have been mostly erased. I suppose the big offender was 3.0 (unless late 2e did some of it?), which allowed DEX to apply to any number of attacks in a round, and added DEX caps to medium and heavy armor, more or less equalizing the potential AC from armor+DEXmod, in each of light, medium, and heavy - oh, and adding touch and incorporeal touch attacks that bypassed armor, as well as scaling save DCs and nerfing PC save progression.

 

[FrogReaver]

I didn't say "force"

I said the game does not mechanical support certain archetypes.


The battlemaster is cool. It's not the warlord. That's the point. The 5e designers thought the battlemster would cover the warlord archetype to 4e warlord fans. It did not hence the many warlord fan classes.

Same how 5e doesn't support defenders as 5e lacks marking and defensive moves as a core concept. The protection style doesn't cover it.

Same how necromancers have bad spells.

IMO. A lot of Warlord fans want the 4e overpowered lazy warlord and that’s an archetype that I think should be unsupported.

At level 3 a Battlemaster fighter focused on the warlord style maneuvers looks something like.

16, 8, 14. 10, 10, 16
Take the fighting style that gives a superiority dice and a maneuver. Take the temp hp maneuver. At level 3 take the movement granting maneuver, the ally attack maneuver and whatever else strikes your fancy.

As with most martials it doesn’t scale well to late game, but for tier 1 and most of tier 2 it’s pretty comparable to a 4e warlord in capabilities, just not power - as martials in 4e were balanced with casters, if not often better than them.

I’d love to see a detailed comparison of Battlemaster and warlord maybe treating level 3 in 5e as comparable to level 1 in 4e.

Like what’s really missing in the low tiers?

 

[Minigiant]

So, what I'm reading begs the question. If you (general you) want to basically swap stats and attributes to fit your theme (I want to have a high CHA fighter and use CHA bonuses in place of STR and DEX), then the question is, "Why have stats at all?" If we're going to make the bonuses totally replaceable and interchangeable, why have them at all? I'm not asking this as some sort of gotcha or sarcastic response, but an honest one.

Do you get rid of them completely and just go to something sorta skill based and bake them into the class?

Fighters: Gain a +3 bonus to hit and damage with attacks (to replicate STR or DEX)
Background: Choose strength based, agility, personality, intellect, or willpower based skills. Gain a +3 bonus to any saving throw or check when doing one of these skills.

That way you could have a fighter who gets the bonuses to attacks as "traditional" fighters, but can be personality rather than strength or dex if they choose.

Or you could have a Front attack or Trickery attack that attacks with Charisma

 

[Tony Vargas]

I did not enjoy NPCs being built like PCs; especially not the NPC classes, which seemed to exist to punish the NPCs for being created.

If you're going to create NPCs in the same time-consuming detail as PCs, NPC classes at least allow for them to be on the same level as PCs, while being less, well, Heroic or Main-Character-y (that is, assuming, your game has any provision for making PCs Heroic or Main-Character-y)

 

[Vaalingrade]

IMO. A lot of Warlord fans want the 4e overpowered lazy warlord and that’s an archetype that I think should be unsupported.

At level 3 a Battlemaster fighter focused on the warlord style maneuvers looks something like.

16, 8, 14. 10, 10, 16
Take the fighting style that gives a superiority dice and a maneuver. Take the temp hp maneuver. At level 3 take the movement granting maneuver, the ally attack maneuver and whatever else strikes your fancy.

As with most martials it doesn’t scale well to late game, but for tier 1 and most of tier 2 it’s pretty comparable to a 4e warlord in capabilities, just not power - as martials in 4e were balanced with casters, if not often better than them.

I’d love to see a detailed comparison of Battlemaster and warlord maybe treating level 3 in 5e as comparable to level 1 in 4e.

Like what’s really missing in the low tiers?

If that's all one thinks a warlord is, but that build does nothing my Cheerlord did. No Pack tactics, not position switching, no aiding in saving throws... it's like the hand puppet version of the warlord. Oh and you don't get any of it reliably across encounters, just locked to the bad rest system.

 

[Tony Vargas]

IMO. A lot of Warlord fans want the 4e overpowered lazy warlord and that’s an archetype that I think should be unsupported.

I mean, that was fan build that got a lot of love & hate, but it was closer to sub-optimal than overpowered. It also is a very nice thing to add to the game, since it allows for genre archetypes and tropes that D&D had never supported before, and, indeed, are hard to make work in a cooperative game driven primarily by characters' in-fiction actions.

 

[FrogReaver]

I mean, that was fan build that got a lot of love & hate, but it was closer to sub-optimal than overpowered. It also is a very nice thing to add to the game, since it allows for genre archetypes and tropes that D&D had never supported before, and, indeed, are hard to make work in a cooperative game driven primarily by characters' in-fiction actions.

Ummm. Lazy Warlord builds were some of the strongest in 4e.