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

[TwinBahamut]

What the wizard does is the same as what Zeus does...

So, Zeus throws 5d6 lightning bolts, averaging 17.5 damage.

Zeus, apparently, is a wimp. Or, alternatively, we are accidentally conflating quality (lightning!) with quantity (#d6) when considering power. The wizard may be qualitatively like Zeus, but not quantitatively.

Actually, in some quantitative ways D&D Wizards surpass Zeus. There are some myths that say that Zeus was actually severely restrained in his ability to throw lightning around. He could throw out one bolt on a whim, a second bolt only under limited circumstances, and a third only with the permission of gods more hidden and powerful than himself. It's sort of a mythical justification of the the "lightning never strikes twice" saying.

Since D&D Wizards can throw lightning around far more than three times in a day (and a heck of a lot more in one round if they Time Stop), then they can actually throw it around more easily and more often than Zeus himself. And of course, they can do a lot of things that Zeus never did in any myth just as easily, without any serious drawbacks or difficulty. Zeus throws around lightning as his sole special combat trick, but for D&D Wizards it is just one more trick in a very, very large arsenal, and in 3E it is actually one of the least effective.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yet giving magic to fighters is exactly what 4E did. They didn't call it magic they called it a martial power source, but make no mistake its fighter magic. So I would put forth the notion that if you want a fighter that solves problems through extrordinary skill and strength alone you don't want the 4E fighter.

Complete and utter rubbish. The ability to hit two guys in the space of six seconds is not magic. It's just using your sword moderately well. And even the "self-healing" (never mind that it relies on Gygax's stated hit point definitions) is no more than action movie physics.

What 4e did was brought the power of combat magic down to that of the fighter.

(The only exception I can think of that might be seen as magic rather than skilled use of a sword is Come and Get It or its upgraded version Warrior's Urging. Oh, and the abilities that allow the Eladrin Knight, who can already teleport thanks to his race, to teleport that bit more.)

...and ths is where I get confused... mid-level to high-level fighters of every edition, are (by the standards of our world) already superhuman. They perform all kinds of superhuman feats, go toe to toe with nightmarish creatures, can survive falls of immense heights, can kill numerous lesser men, and so on.

So with that established... what exactly is it that's being argued for here? Is it versatility? Is it just MORE power? Or is it something else because it's a little confusing on what exactly people want... especially with the "No magic in any form" requirement that also keeps getting expressed.

It's versatility and active as opposed to passive power. The fighter is already supernaturally resilient. But ultimately the closest to an actively supernatural ability the 3.X fighter gets on the offence is the Spikey Chain Whirlwind. Or possibly Manyshot. A 20th level (pre-4e) fighter might be able to survive getting hit square in the chest by a cannon ball. But he still moves at the same speed he moved at at level 1, and attempts to introduce the enemy to the point of his blade by getting in arm's reach. He still defends himself with an AC almost entirely based on what he is wearing.

What we want to see is the fighter's ability to engage to increase (it does a little in 4e but Epic 4e is ... disappointing). A fighter able to smash in a castle wall with a mace or create an earthquake that knocks the canon over before you ever reach it. To cut the top off a mountain. To 'salmon leap' across a ravine or onto the back of a flying dragon rather than trudging after it at 30' per action. Watch some anime or read some celtic myth and start from there.

Oh, and the ability to simply cut or punch through walls of force and other such effects. If physical action can affect it, the high level fighter should be able to destroy it. Prismatic Sphere? Slice. Congratulations, wizard. You bought yourself a round to cast your teleportation spell. (Note that even with this, Prismatic Sphere is still a damn good spell - it neutralises both beasties and other wizards).

Wizards may be subtle and powerful. But if the high level fighter and the wizard walk into the same arena, there should be absolutely no doubt as to the outcome. The fighter beats any wizard stupid enough to find himself in that position.

 

[billd91]

The broader fantasy genre, OTOH - from myth and legend, to fair tales, to S&S or High Fantasy - is full of great warriors slaying terrible monsters single-handed, fighting against whole armies until they stand atop a mountain of the slain, and doing feats of strength and valor far beyond any imaginable human limits. Yet the D&D fighter is held to a bizarre genre-inappropriate standard of 'realism,' a standard that the game, itself, breaks, for every character who accumulates a large number of hps.

Of course the use of gobs of hit points breaks realism. How else have a number of experienced D&D characters being able to stand atop a mountain of the slain - or at least a hillock of a hundred bodies or more? And as far as slaying terrible monsters single-handedly? I've seen crits in excess of 70 points before and that kills a lot of stuff. The ol' DPS optimization boards have builds that can dish out a lot more. And feats of strength? Lifting a portcullis is a pretty difficult task and yet even 1e characters had a shot at that, though you had to be a fighter with exception strength to have much of a chance. The kind of weight an 18-20 strength PC can lug about is pretty impressive, though.

D&D's history, even in 3e, is full of fighters doing these sorts of things. For some of us, this is pretty good territory to be in. I don't see a very compelling reason to much farther than this. I don't have to see fighters cutting hills in twain or redigging riverbeds in an afternoon's work to see that they're far beyond a normal person's capabilities.

 

[SKyOdin]

I'm sure it would be very frustrating and disheartening to perceive that DMs and game designers are actively punishing players by restricting fighters from hill cutting and chasm leaping.

The way I see it is that verisimilitude (not realism per se) already has a baseline or reference point -- real life and/or action movies. Magic has no consistent reference point, so it's not the same uphill battle. For superhuman abilities, I then have to be sold (either through sheer ignorance or suspension of disbelief) on raising to bar for what I want to have as superhuman-possible in an RPG.

Real life and action movies are your baselines? You need to broaden your horizons a little. I draw my inspiration and expectations from history, mythology, classical literature, movies, anime, videogames, and novels of all sorts.

Sheer ignorance: in action movies, people fly through windows all the time and get back up. Realistically, hitting and shattering glass can actually be quite crippling. Who knew? But it never bothered me because I've accepted the trope already and was ignorant of the realism and, well, it's not really a big deal. (I have to smile when people write that PCs aren't superhuman until 5th level or so... I think they're already superhuman at 1st level).

I am pretty sure that everyone knows that broken glass can cut people up badly. I think the "ignorance" argument you are making here sounds like you are looking down on other people, here... I hope that isn't what you are getting at...

Suspension of disbelief: If someone said "it's not fair", well, that may be true mechanically, but it would never change my mind about what I ideally want for fluff. Sell me on the fluff fairly and I'll buy into it. Guy Gavriel Kay, for example, in the Fionavar Tapestry does a tremendous job on selling me a vision of ultra-skilled warriors that I bought into it hook, line and sinker.

Read some actual mythology and classic literature then. When I mentioned the whole "slicing a hill in half", I was actually making a specific reference to the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Irish epic that chronicles the story of Cú Chulainn and other heroes. Half of the Táin consists of fights between various Irish warriors that are used to explain various distinct landmarks in Ireland. Why does a certain hill have a flat top? Because an Irish hero hewed the top of it off with a spear.

If you were to read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Arabian Nights, various significant Chinese novels, mythology of all sorts, and so on, you would be exposed to all sorts of amazing feats such as these.

For example, the great Chinese Novel known in English as Water Margin or The Bandits of the March, has various sorcerers, Buddhist priests, and Daoists in it who can transform things, create illusions, and run like the wind. It also has heroes who can lift boulders the size of houses over their heads or defeat an entire army by throwing stones.

One of my favorite examples comes from the Hindu epic: the Ramayana. At one point in the story, the monkey Hamuman literally tears a mountain off of its foundation, and jumps with it on his back a few hundred miles.

These kinds of stories, the sort of stories that D&D draws a huge amount of material from, make me okay with fighters who can do cool things.

I don't think that the craving for verisimilitude is unreasonable, especially the idea of fighters slicing hills in half. Sell me on it. Hit the fighter with gamma radiation and turn him into a hulking green-skinned brute or something other than "it's not balanced / it's not fair" (I'm not quoting you, I'm just paraphrasing the general argument I think I'm hearing).

Game balance is a much more important concern than verisimilitude. Unlike verisimilitude, which is a strange, hard to pin down thing with an iffy impact on playing D&D, game balance is something that is critically important to game play. A lack of balance can directly lead to problems at the table. You cannot use verisimilitude as an excuse for horrid game balance.

Anyways, if you think that comic book science is necessary to justify fighters doing cool stuff, you really need to read more classical stuff. I strongly suggest you read some of the things I suggested above. If you want to start at the deep end, read the Ramayana. If you want to start with something more familiar, read the Táin or Beowulf.

 

[Underman]

And of course, they can do a lot of things that Zeus never did in any myth just as easily, without any serious drawbacks or difficulty. Zeus throws around lightning as his sole special combat trick, but for D&D Wizards it is just one more trick in a very, very large arsenal, and in 3E it is actually one of the least effective.

This reminds me of the scene in Indiana Jones where one gunshot kills the swordsman dead. The swordsman did have a few good sword tricks though.

 

[SKyOdin]

D&D's history, even in 3e, is full of fighters doing these sorts of things. For some of us, this is pretty good territory to be in. I don't see a very compelling reason to much farther than this. I don't have to see fighters cutting hills in twain or redigging riverbeds in an afternoon's work to see that they're far beyond a normal person's capabilities.

And yet, the D&D wizard is expected to be able to do those kinds of things. If the wizard can't reshape the landscape, disintegrate unwanted landmarks, or teleport the party into an alternate dimension, people complain. Letting the fighter re-dig riverbeds at least lets them keep up.

 

[Underman]

Real life and action movies are your baselines?

Yes, just like it is for Bild91 and numerous other D&D players for the last several decades. (In action movies, the protagonists get away with a lot).

You need to broaden your horizons a little. I draw my inspiration and expectations from history, mythology, classical literature, movies, anime, videogames, and novels of all sorts.

Sure, but the sumtotal is so incohesive, it leads to long discussions/debates like this one, which makes it a confusing and rather useless baseline.

I am pretty sure that everyone knows that broken glass can cut people up badly. I think the "ignorance" argument you are making here sounds like you are looking down on other people, here... I hope that isn't what you are getting at...

It isn't. I guess I was ignorant of the extent of the broken glass damage when I first started watching action movies as a kid.

Read some actual mythology and classic literature then. When I mentioned the whole "slicing a hill in half", I was actually making a specific reference to the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Irish epic that chronicles the story of Cú Chulainn and other heroes.

I get that, but that's mythical, and very little of modern fantasy reads with a truly mythical "logic" (or illogic).

You cannot use verisimilitude as an excuse for horrid game balance.

I don't

 

[Crazy Jerome]

So with that established... what exactly is it that's being argued for here? Is it versatility? Is it just MORE power? Or is it something else because it's a little confusing on what exactly people want... especially with the "No magic in any form" requirement that also keeps getting expressed.

For me, it's two things: Scaling and Consistency.

Scaling -- D&D having covered a wide range of play, I'd like it to scale from low powered to high powered. I'm fine with level being the main power scale, since it traditionally has been. I'll entertain replacement suggestions if people want level to mean something else. I'm fine with lopping off the very ends of the extremes of grit and mythic if that is necessary to make the game work and/or putting those into optional rules. But I want that scaling in there.

Consistency -- I want my scaling somewhat consistent. It need not be lockstep, every class, every level (necessarily), but it does need to be fairly close. I don't mind, for example, wizards, fighters, rogues, and clerics passing each other in raw power by a bit every few levels, as long as you could graph it and see the lines twisting and turning fairly close to a median consistent for all of them.

For me, this is verisimilitude. It is not plausible for me that spell casters run off the scale with every descreasing limits while non casters hit a ceiling that never moves, game after game, world after world. The fiction of D&D is generaly that non casters matter more than that. The mechanics should support it.

Now, ideally, I'd also like that separate scale that I mentioned earlier, so that if I wanted to run a game where fighters and wizards became very broadly competent, but never hit mythic power levels, I could do that. Or if I want to keep them more narrow but mythic, I can do that. Or I can mix and match.


The confusion comes because there are several camps:

• Those that would be happy with everyone becomes mythic, eventually.
• Those that would be happy with no one ever becomes mythic, but at higher levels a spellcaster or item can occasionally pull off something mythic (e.g. allow wish but be nasty about consequences).
• Those that aren't going past about name level anyway, so they don't see and/or care about this.
• Those that have a particular idea of verismilitude for D&D as -- "Caster eventually bend things however they want, non casters don't."

The problem with the latter group is that so often they seemed to have confused their preference for verisimilitude with some kind of "inherently more realistic fantasy conception" when all it really amounts to is "the way D&D has sometimes been."

It's inconsistent. I like consistency. I agree with the original Alexander Pope quote, "Foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," more often than the deliberate inversion by Emerson later, which so many people quote today. Really, it depends upon the particular little minds in question which is more appropriate, but Emerson's version has so caught modern attention, that reflection upon why he would invert it is rare.

 

[Shadeydm]

Complete and utter rubbish. The ability to hit two guys in the space of six seconds is not magic. It's just using your sword moderately well.

If the ability to two guys in the space of six seconds were mundane and not magic my 4E Fighter would do it every round and probably rarely use an at will. So yep its fighter magic.

 

[SKyOdin]

You really need to reread the books then. Gandalf's spell to deal with the wolves in Hollin even has an incantation. But ultimately when playing (or designing) a game inspired by literature, you look at what goes on in the literature and you translate that into things that the players can do. If that means that it works to look at Aragorn's healing as a spell, then as a game designer you treat it as a spell.

You are so completely stuck in a certain game design paradigm that it seems like you can't see outside of it. Why does magic need to be codified into spells? The answer is that it doesn't, that is just an arbitrary choice D&D made at the beginning. There is no necessary reason for magic to quantized into spells where each spell has a particular effect.

In fact, real world magical traditions don't really work like that. (Yes, people actually concocted complex magical systems and theories in the real world, obviously they don't actually work.) Amusingly, the 3E Binder is the one D&D class that actually emulates certain real-world magical systems, and it doesn't use spells.

What I'm pointing out is that being a high-powered, high-level, PC who fights demon lords and gods doesn't require a PC to be a demigod or even viewed as a demi-god. Other intermediate levels of classification work just as well - like DDG's heroes. Nor is it silly to view them as anything other than demigods, as you suggest.

The point isn't to assume they are demigods, but to point out their strength is on par with that of the demigods of myth and legend. So, even if a character isn't technically a demigod, they should still be able to match the feats of demigods.

Who says that everything has to? But you need a starting point and using the real world is the best and easiest model we have that we also have a reasonably common understanding of. Things fall when dropped. Heat rises. Granite is harder than talc and makes for better castle walls. That's what says a D&D character can't jump 30 feet in the air without some form of exception. If you're too ready to ditch our real-world physics model, you have to spend a lot of time redefining it in order for a player's expectations in a game to make sense. Computer games do that, but then they have to in order for the players' avatars to be able to do anything at all. That's not the case in pen and paper RPGs where the assumption is that the the way the real world works forms a baseline reality for the game.

Sure, there are more exceptions that just magic. But in your typical fantasy setting, it's among the most powerful ones as far as creating variation (bound by virtually nothing) and the one that's most supportive of the fantasy genre.

There is no requirement to fall back on the laws of physics at all. Ultimately, game rules are not a physics system, they are merely a means of adjudicating player actions. For that matter, most videogames don't emulate physics at all, nor do they create alternative physics. That kind of thing is usually unnecessary, and games always drop physics in favor of what is entertaining or fun.

Furthermore, D&D rules generally are not as gritty as you are claiming. For one, where is the rule that granite is harder than talc? I don't recall a "hardness by stone type" table. Furthermore, such real world physics concerns obviously don't apply to 80% of what goes on in a D&D campaign.

As has been mentioned several times in this thread, most monsters completely violate the laws of physics. As do alternate planes, magical devices, strange environments, and so on.

In fact, in certain relatively common D&D scenarios, such as a party making a jaunt to another plane, the fighter is the only thing in the entire situation that is bound is bound by "realism". Even gravity doesn't care, since many planes use "subjective gravity", which is a ludicrous concept in the real world. In a universe where you can't count on gravity or even euclidian geometry, why should the fighter be bound by real world physics?

In most cases, the fighter being bound by real world physics is the exception, rather than magic being the exception.