D&D 5E The Fighter/Martial Problem (In Depth Ponderings)

[Tony Vargas]

Is it? At a macro-level, absolutely, you get in front of the invading horde and try and stop them from rampaging through the town, but at the level of a singular squad v. squad fight the only real trope that comes up regularly is heroically stepping in to block/take a blow that was about to fell someone else. That does sound like a reasonable reaction-type ability, something like a counterspell for attacks, but I'm not sure it's a role unto itself.

That, holding choke point, taking on the big bad in single combat, holding off something nasty while someone else does something... it's a set of common tropes, I think.

And, TTRPGs, with their ensemble casts rather than Hero+supporting cast, need to leverage anything that can be broken out from generalized heroism like that.

The whole "tank" idea, as a specific individual inside a small squad who should get hit the most, I think is a self-reflected D&Dism, refined in other mediums and genres of games. You really need multiple people, either doing matching point to point defenses, doing some kind of zone control, or creating physical shield walls and so on to play effective defense, and to what degree is that necessary/appropriate when Evard's Black Tentacles is in play?

There is a lot of virtue-of-necessity, goals-set-after-results-are-in stuff like that in D&D, yes. The first half of the game's history it changed very little, I suppose it was inevitable.
And, yes, in genre an effect like Evard's Black Tentacles would more likely be something placed between the heroes and their confrontation with the villain or other dramatic goal.

Back in the D&D bubble, the question "is defending just melee controlling" has been known to come up. And, well, in the sense that anyone doing damage is a striker, or 0 hp is the best control, maybe? In the sense that you can get another possible nominally equal PC into your ensemble cast without stepping on someone else's toes, tho, it's a fine role. It feels very different from the usual condition-inflicting control, a big difference being that controller keeps danger at a distance, ideally from the party, at least from themselves, while defenders get in danger's face.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I'd like to think that would be the case, but remember that the last edition had all these things, and it was rejected in favor of Fighters who primarily dish out damage and have to specifically choose to be Defenders, which we know isn't a popular choice because people love to be Champions and Battlemasters, but rarely choose to be Cavaliers. So again, I submit that players don't want to be caster bodyguards, which is why casters don't currently need bodyguards to the degree they once did.

You can't make casters dependent on martials if the martials don't care to protect the casters in the first place.

maybe, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it a viable playstyle for anyone who wants to play a defender

 

[James Gasik]

maybe, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it a viable playstyle for anyone who wants to play a defender

I would be very happy if Fighters in particular got extra reactions to use for things like Protection Fighting Style more effectively, and that things like "Bear. While you're raging, any creature within 5 feet of you that's hostile to you has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets other than you or another character with this feature. An enemy is immune to this effect if it can't see or hear you or if it can't be frightened" weren't sitting at FOURTEENTH LEVEL (!?).

Or that Battlemasters could use Goading Attack every turn at lower levels of play. But WotC decided first, to make it hard to assume the Defender role. Then, when things like the Cavalier were printed, few players seemed interested (though to be fair, the branding of the subclass doesn't help- people equate "Cavalier" to mounted combat, not "Veteran Bodyguard").

But even if you did give better Defender tools to martials, there's no guarantee that they'll want to use them, or that they will use them in the intended manner. Which is why a class that requires someone to protect it is a non-starter.

Especially since WotC doesn't want to force people to play specific classes- if we give the Fighter back their Defender powers, does that mean you can't play a Wizard unless someone else plays a Fighter? What if I want to be a Barbarian? Or a Ranger?

"Sorry Timmy, nobody wants to be your babysitter, why don't you play an Eldritch Knight instead?".

You'd be better off removing the Wizard from the game, IMO, than forcing a playstyle on people who apparently don't want it.

 

[Pedantic]

Back in the D&D bubble, the question "is defending just melee controlling" has been known to come up. And, well, in the sense that anyone doing damage is a striker, or 0 hp is the best control, maybe? In the sense that you can get another possible nominally equal PC into your ensemble cast without stepping on someone else's toes, tho, it's a fine role. It feels very different from the usual condition-inflicting control, a big difference being that controller keeps danger at a distance, ideally from the party, at least from themselves, while defenders get in danger's face.

This has always felt backwards to me, going back to discussions about how important marking was, when it's obviously not the "picking a target and giving them a minor penalty" that's the important part of the 4e defender's toolkit, but the CC and/or conditional damage.

I can imagine that you can set a certain amount of action/effectiveness denial as a standard for most encounters: if you were just trading straight blows with foes, you would generally not succeed, and need to combine that with devaluing their attacks in other ways to win. Why that part of the PC's combat contribution budget should be strapped to a specific class or character does not strike me as obvious or necessary. I can imagine a world where alchemical items have reasonable scaling, and that's provided by an attack/action trade-off to deploy a tanglefoot bag, and every character has several of them.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I would be very happy if Fighters in particular got extra reactions to use for things like Protection Fighting Style more effectively, and that things like "Bear. While you're raging, any creature within 5 feet of you that's hostile to you has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets other than you or another character with this feature. An enemy is immune to this effect if it can't see or hear you or if it can't be frightened" weren't sitting at FOURTEENTH LEVEL (!?).

Or that Battlemasters could use Goading Attack every turn at lower levels of play. But WotC decided first, to make it hard to assume the Defender role. Then, when things like the Cavalier were printed, few players seemed interested (though to be fair, the branding of the subclass doesn't help- people equate "Cavalier" to mounted combat, not "Veteran Bodyguard").

But even if you did give better Defender tools to martials, there's no guarantee that they'll want to use them, or that they will use them in the intended manner. Which is why a class that requires someone to protect it is a non-starter.

Especially since WotC doesn't want to force people to play specific classes- if we give the Fighter back their Defender powers, does that mean you can't play a Wizard unless someone else plays a Fighter? What if I want to be a Barbarian? Or a Ranger?

"Sorry Timmy, nobody wants to be your babysitter, why don't you play an Eldritch Knight instead?".

You'd be better off removing the Wizard from the game, IMO, than forcing a playstyle on people who apparently don't want it.

providing the options to do it still doesn't force anyone into having to take the role or will mean that certain classes will need defending, in that situation you'll only have and use defender abilities if you want to use them and if no-one 'needs' defending there's no real 'wrong way' to use them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This has always felt backwards to me, going back to discussions about how important marking was, when it's obviously not the "picking a target and giving them a minor penalty" that's the important part of the 4e defender's toolkit, but the CC and/or conditional damage.

the basic defender idea was to give the enemy a bad choice - either stand and fight the high-Defense, high-hp, lots of big surges defender or try to get away or attack someone else, with a reduced chance of success, and probably take more damage.

A lot of electrons were spilled in debating which bad choice the player had to force on the enemy to optimize the role.
The point was, they're both meant to be bad choices.

I can imagine that you can set a certain amount of action/effectiveness denial as a standard for most encounters: if you were just trading straight blows with foes, you would generally not succeed, and need to combine that with devaluing their attacks in other ways to win. Why that part of the PC's combat contribution budget should be strapped to a specific class or character does not strike me as obvious or necessary.

As with all things D&D

And, really, this does go all the way back to the OG Fighting Man

More philosophically, for a cooperative game, it helps to give the different players different contributions to make. Classes may or may not have been consciously conceived for that purpose, but they served it.
Roles fairly quickly, if informally, emerged from that class system.

Perhaps if the iconic fighter, tank, or defender role seems ill-advised or ineffectual, it's because the fighter has gotten such short shrift most of the time? It's certainly not a great role to try to build for in 5e. Not only is it mechanically poorly supported, but as a primarily melee approach, it's just broadly disfavored by the system. All sorts of things add up to make melee a surprisingly bad idea for, y'know, a genre with all sorts of images of heroes weilding swords &c.

providing the options to do it still doesn't force anyone into having to take the role or will mean that certain classes will need defending, in that situation you'll only have and use defender abilities if you want to use them and if no-one 'needs' defending there's no real 'wrong way' to use them.

True.
The very nature of D&D hit points, the fact they don't come with a death spiral for being wounded, makes the simple tactic of focus fire - burn down one enemy to remove it from the enemies' action economy first, then start on the next - very effective, optimal, even.

The defender role can simply break up focus fire, whether anyone 'needs' to be defended, at all.
(in legit 4e discussion, you'd hear about a defender who was over-optimized and got dog-piled by the whole encounter)

 

[Vaalingrade]

Is it?

Yes, but rarely party members.

It's pretty iconic to see the hero leap down from on high and take the hit that would have ended some normal people who now shelter in the hero's shadow as the hero just flat ignores the damage dealt.

Which should also be a fighter thing. just no selling a big blow for zero damage.

There's also the 'buy me time' thing where someone is setting up something and the hero has to body block. D&D neither understands how to do multi-round actions, nor body blocking.

 

[FrogReaver]

Is it? At a macro-level, absolutely, you get in front of the invading horde and try and stop them from rampaging through the town, but at the level of a singular squad v. squad fight the only real trope that comes up regularly is heroically stepping in to block/take a blow that was about to fell someone else. That does sound like a reasonable reaction-type ability, something like a counterspell for attacks, but I'm not sure it's a role unto itself.

The whole "tank" idea, as a specific individual inside a small squad who should get hit the most, I think is a self-reflected D&Dism, refined in other mediums and genres of games. You really need multiple people, either doing matching point to point defenses, doing some kind of zone control, or creating physical shield walls and so on to play effective defense, and to what degree is that necessary/appropriate when Evard's Black Tentacles is in play?

Effective 5e defenders can be built. I've done it. It's just solo classed fighters are terrible defenders. You really need a good combination of high hp/ac, good mobility, proper use of positioning, good OA damage and all the while not sacrificing too much damage to get these effects. Ability to grapple is also a huge bonus. That's a combination fighters just don't provide out of the box.

That said...

• Cleric - Spirit Guardians + Dodge likely makes a more effective defender and you have spells useful for other situations
• Druid - Conjure Animals. That spell alone does a better job of defending than any build i've seen. And that's even if the dm is picking or randomizing the animals you summon. Add in Plant Growth for any enemies lacking ranged attacks.
• Wizards - Web (but plenty of others). Web is just so effective and it's only a 2nd level slot. (Heck, speaking of narrow doorways and hallways web is great there too, also grease in a small space can be hilariously effective and is only a level 1 slot).

All of these options reasonably achieve what a Defender is trying to achieve only A) better and B) are only a small amount of your build budget.

I guess i'm saying I mostly agree - just wanted to elaborate on it a bit.

***Almost forgot - the defender role is largely subsumed by the healer role. There's little need to funnel enemies into a strong defender when you can just heal whatever hp was lost by whatever party member.

 

[FrogReaver]

What I hate is even if you like being a healer, healing spells just aren't efficient and you're better off casting most anything else outside of the occasional level 1 Healing Word to get a fallen guy back up for a round.

But that ship has sailed, and when I complain about it, I keep getting told "that's a feature", lol.

I don’t know about feature but if you make in combat healing too efficient you end up with a defacto requirement to bring along a healer as the teams capability is noticeably different with and without one.

note: life clerics do make good healers due their channel divinity, your just aiming to keep people at half hp instead of max. Upcasted Aid really helps here as well.

 

[Pedantic]

What I hate is even if you like being a healer, healing spells just aren't efficient and you're better off casting most anything else outside of the occasional level 1 Healing Word to get a fallen guy back up for a round.

But that ship has sailed, and when I complain about it, I keep getting told "that's a feature", lol.

I'm not super sold on the healing word approach as the best option, but I do think that a game with action efficient healing is generally worse off than one without. Having effective healing requires you to have larger HP pools and longer combats.

Imagine a simple system where enemies hit for 1 damage. In order to be efficient, your healing action needs to heal for >1 damage, say 1.5-2. In order to actually capitalize on that efficiency, you need the enemy to hit your party member twice, which means you need HP pools of at least 3, if not 4 or 5 in order to allow sufficient padding for the timing to work out.

And that's before you get into the thornier damage question, where that action could instead have been spent doing damage to the enemy, which requires the action be even more efficient, which requires even more HP padding, and even more total actions per combat. I just don't think it's generally worth it in most turn-based combat systems outside of edge cases like someone actually going down or limited action-less healing (which probably ought to generally be self-healing, so you can silo it by class).