D&D 5E The Door, Player Expectations, and why 5e can't unify the fanbase.

[RangerWickett]

I don't want to see high level fighter = demigod. Hercules and Cuchulain were demigods and born with superhuman ability.

Actually, Herc and Cooshy were just regular Joes who were so tough that the local tabloids starting running stories that they had to be half-god. It's really sad how mythology mischaracterizes those guys.

Less jokey, all that matters to me is that they were guys who kicked butt with their bodies, not with spells. That makes them fighters. Mythology doesn't have the same "gain XP to get more powerful" progression that D&D does, so we usually don't let players say, "My character is half-god, so he's going to start at 15th level."

Moving aside from mythology, what about wuxia characters? Kung fu bad-asses who run across treetops and throw knives that can chop off people's heads.

Or Jimi Hendrix, who stands next to a mountain and chops it down with the edge of his hand?

In a world where magic suffuses so many different things, why can't a high-level fighter just be a guy who intuitively has figured out how to be stronger, faster, and tougher than normal flesh would allow?

 

[Imaro]

In short the fighter is a very specialised form of caster? This I find incredibly weird as a "generic hitty guy" class.

What spells?? This is akin to saying a fighter is a limited caster because he uses magic weapons, which he does in every edition. He's becoming the ultimate fighter by mastering as opposed to just using the ultimate weapons in the D&D environment... Are we reading the same thing?

Because it makes the fighter into a magic user? The key thing about a fighter is that he fights. Not that he's a sort of artificer. And I'd argue that a high level fighter ought to be able to slay a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass rather than be entirely reliant on magic swords.

Again, what is he casting or building? Are you reading what I'm actually posting? As to killing a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass... hell an older edition fighter of a high enough level can kill more than a thousand commoners with a bone... so you already have that. What I'm trying to do is give him some versatility.

 

[Imaro]

In a world where magic suffuses so many different things, why can't a high-level fighter just be a guy who intuitively has figured out how to be stronger, faster, and tougher than normal flesh would allow?

So he'd be magical? See I think the issue with the above is really... how do you tie this into the fiction and the D&D "world". IMO, this makes them either copies or very similar to Dawn Caste Exalted or Earthdawn Adepts... which isn't necessarily a bad thing but is it D&D?? I figure why not make the preponderance of magic items in the D&D game a strength (at least for fighters).

 

[SKyOdin]

So he'd be magical? See I think the issue with the above is really... how do you tie this into the fiction and the D&D "world". IMO, this makes them either copies or very similar to Dawn Caste Exalted or Earthdawn Adepts... which isn't necessarily a bad thing but is it D&D?? I figure why not make the preponderance of magic items in the D&D game a strength (at least for fighters).

The entire idea of a strict mundane/magical divide is a silly conceit of D&D and its off-shoot fiction that has no basis in the mythology and literature D&D was originally based on.

 

[Imaro]

The entire idea of a strict mundane/magical divide is a silly conceit of D&D and its off-shoot fiction that has no basis in the mythology and literature D&D was originally based on.

Uhm... this isn't true. There are protagonists of sword and sorcery (a big influence on D&D) that simply do not cast spells and are not "superhuman". Conan and Fafhrd... are two examples that spring to mind.

EDIT: Also thinking about high fantasy, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir and (Unless I'm mistaken) Aragorn don't use magic spells either.

 

[Neonchameleon]

he can change a weapon between a flameblade and an icingdeath, ferinstance.

What spells??

He's manipulating magic to set the sword on ice and lower the temperature a few hundred degrees. You don't call that a spell?

That his focus is swords and armour not wands doesn't change the fact that he is magically changing the properties of physical objects in a way that no direct application of force could even in the hands of Michael Bay's grasp on physics - this is a spell.

Uhm... this isn't true. There are protagonists of sword and sorcery (a big influence on D&D) that simply do not cast spells and are not "superhuman". Conan and Fafhrd... are two examples that spring to mind.

EDIT: Also thinking about high fantasy, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir and (Unless I'm mistaken) Aragorn don't use magic spells either.

Aragorn's borderline - Athelas - is that a spell or is that a supernatural property that only he can release - and the Palantir.

But this is a level issue. Fafhrd is much lower level than Hercules. And even he can take part in rocket-propelled skiing. Mundane fighters cap out at about 3.X level six - after that the plausibility meter breaks. We have different takes on what to do next.

I want to keep them as fighters, increasing their strength and toughness way beyond the human limit and allowing them to behave like fighters running first on action movie physics then on anime and celtic myth physics. And if they need to be supernatural to behave as fighters then so be it. You want them to explicitely be able to manipulate a form of magic wizards and sages can't.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Uhm... this isn't true. There are protagonists of sword and sorcery (a big influence on D&D) that simply do not cast spells and are not "superhuman". Conan and Fafhrd... are two examples that spring to mind.

EDIT: Also thinking about high fantasy, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir and (Unless I'm mistaken) Aragorn don't use magic spells either.

Every last one of those does "mythic" things, though. I suppose Faramir and Boromir can be read as an exceptions, but I don't read them that way.

Besides, by the "translate to exclude the superhuman" standard Prospero, Merlin, Gandalf, etc. aren't much to shake a stick at, either. The translation from oral story or novel to game character tends to ramp anyone up a bit, because people like to do stuff.

I've often thought that Pug was so popular because he was "Gandalf throwing his weight around." Of course, Midkemia is based on a D&D campaign, which is why Tomas is a fighter that had to merge with a suit of armor to gain some of his abilities (or rather, a spirit in a suit of armor, with some mythic time travel involved), but even here he wasn't dependent upon the armor going forward.

 

[SKyOdin]

Uhm... this isn't true. There are protagonists of sword and sorcery (a big influence on D&D) that simply do not cast spells and are not "superhuman". Conan and Fafhrd... are two examples that spring to mind.

EDIT: Also thinking about high fantasy, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir and (Unless I'm mistaken) Aragorn don't use magic spells either.

You miss my point. Aragorn doesn't cast spells, but he is definitively super-human. He lives for like 200 years and can heal people with a touch (at least, the "hands of a king" are ascribed particularly potent healing properties). Yet, none of these qualities are segregated out from the norm as "magical". They are just a natural part of the world he lives in. Likewise, he lives in a world where birds can talk, but this isn't considered weird or magical, only natural and normal.

The idea that "magic" is something that only comes from "spells" which are used by "spell-casters", while things that are not touched by this "magic" are "mundane" and thus bound by real-world physics, is a paradigm that is practically a complete invention by D&D. It isn't even totally true within D&D. D&D still presumes things such as giants and gryphons which are not possible within the framework of real-world physics, yet are still a natural part of the world.


Going into the topic of whether or not D&D heroes can be based on the likes of Hercules and other mythological demi-gods, it is worth pointing out that the monsters they fought (the Hydra, the Minotaur, Cerberus, the Chimera, etc.) were all demigods as well. And yet, all of these monsters are considered perfectly acceptable opponents for D&D heroes, if not downright plain or ordinary ones. Heck, Giants are based in part on the Giants and Titans of Greek and Norse myth, who were equals to the gods themselves, if not their direct relatives.

Given the opposition they go against, it is silly to say that a high-level D&D party are not themselves demigods, at least in terms of power.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Let me explore another slant. Assertion: The characterization of high power in D&D has often been particularly badly named and characterized. For example, "epic" in the last two versions doesn't actually describe what it is. Epic can be relatively low-powered, even gritty in some stories. What they really meant was "mythic".

The confusion comes from the way D&D tends to collapse growth of breadth in a character into levels, along with raw power. Even 4E, with its more conscious mimicry of the mythic source material, botches this somewhat. It's also that the "farm boy to demigod" path is a particular form of epic that sometimes gets thought of as "the epic." (I blame Campbell's monomyth--or rather his rabid disciples of same.)



What we would really like is some kind of character evolution on two distinct, independent tracts, something like:

• Power - starting at grit and ending at mythic
• Scope - starting at farm kid and ending at world (or plane) spanning epic

Then you can still have a farm kid that ends up a (mythic) demi-god, but you can also have a farm-kid that goes on some epic adventure, learns a lot, but stays shy of demigod, or even firmly in grit.

The closest D&D has ever come to this is, surprise, the AD&D wizard. He collects known spells in his book almost totally independent of his level. His level is his power; his spellbook is his scope. If you run one of those long-running, political campaigns with a miserly XP award variant, he hits about name level and mostly stays around there for ages, but his scope broaded constantly.

Edit: Tentatively, this suggests to me that the fighter's "mastery of arms" should work more like the AD&D wizard's known spells, rather than be based on levels, and should have a similar wide-ranging effect on ways that the fighter can operate--i.e. well outside straight fights into leadership of soldiers, politics, etc.

 

[Zustiur]

Hope the above helps.

Yes, thankyou. That was exactly the kind of information I was seeking.


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