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The Fighter/Martial Problem (In Depth Ponderings)
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9143688" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>I am pleased to say I was not nearly as appalled by that as I expected to be, and actually agreed with great swaths of it. Some good pondering there. Our key point of departure starts here:</p><p></p><p>Of course the fighter kills stuff (KS). So does everyone else, except the 3e pacifist cleric (PC ..no, wait). As you point out, it was with weapon specialization in 2e (and part way through 1e) that the fighter got good at KS.[spoiler]</p><p>IMHO, one of the only really good sub-systems D&D has ever generated was Hit Points. I went into more detail in "what do you actually like about D&D." One of the downsides of hp, is that they make one reasonable tactic: focus fire, like, the tactic. Another is that the way hp, attacks, armor, and damage bonuses work make multiple attacks/round vs a single target problematic, almost impossible to weight correctly. </p><p></p><p>The late-1e/2e dual-wielding/double-specialist firehose of melee damage that was the one powerful 'build' of fighter available (like you had enough options to call it a build back in the day) was just that mechanical foible.</p><p>Now, that mechanical foible hasn't gone away, and the 5e fighter's claim to relevance is that it gets lot of attacks, and thus exploits that same perennial failing of att/rnd/AC/hp. </p><p>[/spoiler] Before that, it had two roles stated/implied by the game itself. 1) protect your magic-user allies who can zap the enemy, and your cleric allies who can heal you and 2) become a leader, to wit, a feudal Lord. Both those stuck around through 2e, and that first basic vision of the Fighter has been second only the the Cleric in it's certainty and consistency. The Fighter was stereotyped as a protector, almost as much as the Cleric was as a healer. Even back in the day, people called a plate-armored fighter a 'tank.' Of course, the fighter got to be a feudal lord only at name level, by building money-pit castle, but that was late-in a campaign, and he had no class abilities that made him any good at it. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite10" alt=":oops:" title="Oops! :oops:" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":oops:" /> But, while the fighter was 1hp/level better at taking hits than a cleric, and 3/hp level better than the MU, on average, he had no abilities to actually take those hits for his buddies, as would become apparent...</p><p></p><p>(Funny thing happened, programmers started mining D&D for ideas and tried to make fighters tanks in their games, and they realized there was an issue. Nothing about the fighter made enemies attack it instead of its allies. All those years, DMs had had a thumb on the scale. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😯" title="Hushed face :hushed:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f62f.png" data-shortname=":hushed:" /> So, they invented Aggro. )</p><p></p><p>Come 3e, the fighter (as an aside, by far, the best class design in 3.0, customizeable and downright elegant - a feat of design marred only by every other class in the game. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😱" title="Face screaming in fear :scream:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" data-shortname=":scream:" /> Although no longer becoming a fuedal lord (which made having no feudal-lord skills or abilities OK, I guess), the 3e PH talked up the Fighter as a natural party leader who 'anchors the team,' again, with nothing whatsoever to back that up.</p><p>Having played some vidyagames in the mean time, some 3e fans started noticing "hey the <s>emperor </s>fighter has no <s>clothes </s>Aggro!"</p><p></p><p>4e came along and fixed everything. Which shows to go you, you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. </p><p> 4e introduced formal labels for the traditional "Big 4" roles (y'know, Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, & Thief - respectively, defender, leader (sounds cooler than 'healer,' but, again, careful what you wish for), Controller, and Striker.. Ok, that last one was stretch, but it's better than Trap Fodder). As a Defender, the Fighter got a Mark mechanic that penalized enemies' attacks, against his allies, and he could take immediate attack against an enemy who attacked an ally, but not the marking fighter. The fighter also got, like everyone else, two at wills (in addition to the mundane attack everyone had always gotten, appropriately dubbed 'basic'), encounters, utilities, and dailies. In the Fighters' (martial in general) case, they were called 'exploits.' Ultimately over 400 of them, each unique to the fighter class, picking a total of 16 over 30 levels.... Only the Wizard got more spells to choose from than the fighter got exploits. </p><p>It was fun while it lasted, which almost exactly 2 years. </p><p></p><p>Essentials split the Fighter into two-daililess sub-<s>standards</s>-classes the Knight, a defender with an Aura enemies could just step out of to murder his allies, and the Slayer, the KS sub-class ... towards the end, it added an MS sub-class, the Eldritch Knight.</p><p></p><p>5e picked up the Eldritch Knight, called the Slayer the Champion, and replaced the Knight with the Sentinel Feat. The 4e fighter got a bowdlerized version, the BM. Subsequent fighters included MS's and a very-unC CS.</p><p>The fighter had always received a lot of complaints about doing nothing but "I attack" every round. To address this, 5e gave the Fighter more helpings of the Extra Attack Feature than any other class, and, to further spice things up, Action Surge, which gave the fighter another whole action, that could be used for anything the fighter could do anyway, which, y'know, unless you were an EK or MC'd, was attack - but with all your extra attacks! So, the fighter is back to it's 2e KS tricks. Multiple attacks leveraging the foibles of att/rnd/AC/hp to do a lotta damage to one target in one round.</p><p></p><p>So what's the problem, really? There's several. </p><p>The game presents Fighter and full caster classes as equally weighted choices. It doesn't 'cost' you anything to play one class or another. Which means, unless the game is trying to trap you (it is), those choices should be equally worthwhile. They're not, not even close. This is euphamistically called the martial/caster gap, more simply, it means D&D is a bad game. </p><p>The fighter's place in D&D has not really changed, but he's back to no mechanical support for it. </p><p>The Fighter is still supposed to protect the squishies, but, the squishies aren't squishy any more, and caster control can far more efficiently lock down enemies than the fighter can (even the BM, or with the Sentinel feat). Fighers are still supposed to represent all the great warriors, soldiers, knights, heroes, and generals of genre/myth/history, but have precious little class tools to do that with. Want to be a knight? Take the Noble background. Want to be a Hero? Folk Hero Background. Soldier? Soldier background. General? Inspiring Leader Feat. None of those are choices found in the fighter class, tho. A Rogue can be an Inspiring Leader, a Cleric can be a Folk Hero, a Warlock can be a noble-born knight, a Wizard can be a soldier. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="🤷" title="Person shrugging :person_shrugging:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937.png" data-shortname=":person_shrugging:" /> </p><p></p><p>5e.2024 offers, so far... weapon masteries. Originally for the fighter, already doled out to other classes... which is reminiscent of the Next playtest, 10 years ago, which introduced Martial Damage Dice (an alternative to multi-attack that let you perform maneuvers), which were well-received, rolled out to other martial/half-caster types the next packet, given to everyone the following packet, then gone forever.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 9143688, member: 996"] I am pleased to say I was not nearly as appalled by that as I expected to be, and actually agreed with great swaths of it. Some good pondering there. Our key point of departure starts here: Of course the fighter kills stuff (KS). So does everyone else, except the 3e pacifist cleric (PC ..no, wait). As you point out, it was with weapon specialization in 2e (and part way through 1e) that the fighter got good at KS.[spoiler] IMHO, one of the only really good sub-systems D&D has ever generated was Hit Points. I went into more detail in "what do you actually like about D&D." One of the downsides of hp, is that they make one reasonable tactic: focus fire, like, the tactic. Another is that the way hp, attacks, armor, and damage bonuses work make multiple attacks/round vs a single target problematic, almost impossible to weight correctly. The late-1e/2e dual-wielding/double-specialist firehose of melee damage that was the one powerful 'build' of fighter available (like you had enough options to call it a build back in the day) was just that mechanical foible. Now, that mechanical foible hasn't gone away, and the 5e fighter's claim to relevance is that it gets lot of attacks, and thus exploits that same perennial failing of att/rnd/AC/hp. [/spoiler] Before that, it had two roles stated/implied by the game itself. 1) protect your magic-user allies who can zap the enemy, and your cleric allies who can heal you and 2) become a leader, to wit, a feudal Lord. Both those stuck around through 2e, and that first basic vision of the Fighter has been second only the the Cleric in it's certainty and consistency. The Fighter was stereotyped as a protector, almost as much as the Cleric was as a healer. Even back in the day, people called a plate-armored fighter a 'tank.' Of course, the fighter got to be a feudal lord only at name level, by building money-pit castle, but that was late-in a campaign, and he had no class abilities that made him any good at it. :oops: But, while the fighter was 1hp/level better at taking hits than a cleric, and 3/hp level better than the MU, on average, he had no abilities to actually take those hits for his buddies, as would become apparent... (Funny thing happened, programmers started mining D&D for ideas and tried to make fighters tanks in their games, and they realized there was an issue. Nothing about the fighter made enemies attack it instead of its allies. All those years, DMs had had a thumb on the scale. 😯 So, they invented Aggro. ) Come 3e, the fighter (as an aside, by far, the best class design in 3.0, customizeable and downright elegant - a feat of design marred only by every other class in the game. 😱 Although no longer becoming a fuedal lord (which made having no feudal-lord skills or abilities OK, I guess), the 3e PH talked up the Fighter as a natural party leader who 'anchors the team,' again, with nothing whatsoever to back that up. Having played some vidyagames in the mean time, some 3e fans started noticing "hey the [S]emperor [/S]fighter has no [S]clothes [/S]Aggro!" 4e came along and fixed everything. Which shows to go you, you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. 4e introduced formal labels for the traditional "Big 4" roles (y'know, Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, & Thief - respectively, defender, leader (sounds cooler than 'healer,' but, again, careful what you wish for), Controller, and Striker.. Ok, that last one was stretch, but it's better than Trap Fodder). As a Defender, the Fighter got a Mark mechanic that penalized enemies' attacks, against his allies, and he could take immediate attack against an enemy who attacked an ally, but not the marking fighter. The fighter also got, like everyone else, two at wills (in addition to the mundane attack everyone had always gotten, appropriately dubbed 'basic'), encounters, utilities, and dailies. In the Fighters' (martial in general) case, they were called 'exploits.' Ultimately over 400 of them, each unique to the fighter class, picking a total of 16 over 30 levels.... Only the Wizard got more spells to choose from than the fighter got exploits. It was fun while it lasted, which almost exactly 2 years. Essentials split the Fighter into two-daililess sub-[S]standards[/S]-classes the Knight, a defender with an Aura enemies could just step out of to murder his allies, and the Slayer, the KS sub-class ... towards the end, it added an MS sub-class, the Eldritch Knight. 5e picked up the Eldritch Knight, called the Slayer the Champion, and replaced the Knight with the Sentinel Feat. The 4e fighter got a bowdlerized version, the BM. Subsequent fighters included MS's and a very-unC CS. The fighter had always received a lot of complaints about doing nothing but "I attack" every round. To address this, 5e gave the Fighter more helpings of the Extra Attack Feature than any other class, and, to further spice things up, Action Surge, which gave the fighter another whole action, that could be used for anything the fighter could do anyway, which, y'know, unless you were an EK or MC'd, was attack - but with all your extra attacks! So, the fighter is back to it's 2e KS tricks. Multiple attacks leveraging the foibles of att/rnd/AC/hp to do a lotta damage to one target in one round. So what's the problem, really? There's several. The game presents Fighter and full caster classes as equally weighted choices. It doesn't 'cost' you anything to play one class or another. Which means, unless the game is trying to trap you (it is), those choices should be equally worthwhile. They're not, not even close. This is euphamistically called the martial/caster gap, more simply, it means D&D is a bad game. The fighter's place in D&D has not really changed, but he's back to no mechanical support for it. The Fighter is still supposed to protect the squishies, but, the squishies aren't squishy any more, and caster control can far more efficiently lock down enemies than the fighter can (even the BM, or with the Sentinel feat). Fighers are still supposed to represent all the great warriors, soldiers, knights, heroes, and generals of genre/myth/history, but have precious little class tools to do that with. Want to be a knight? Take the Noble background. Want to be a Hero? Folk Hero Background. Soldier? Soldier background. General? Inspiring Leader Feat. None of those are choices found in the fighter class, tho. A Rogue can be an Inspiring Leader, a Cleric can be a Folk Hero, a Warlock can be a noble-born knight, a Wizard can be a soldier. 🤷 5e.2024 offers, so far... weapon masteries. Originally for the fighter, already doled out to other classes... which is reminiscent of the Next playtest, 10 years ago, which introduced Martial Damage Dice (an alternative to multi-attack that let you perform maneuvers), which were well-received, rolled out to other martial/half-caster types the next packet, given to everyone the following packet, then gone forever. [/QUOTE]
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