D&D 5E The Legacy of the Fighter in 5 to 10 years

[Psikerlord#]

Sacrosanct you are having some serious trading comprehension issues here. I never once said the 5e fighter could perform superhuman feats. It can't. It is entirely mundane. And that is the problem

Let's make this clear, to kill a creature like a T-Rex let alone a dragon a human would need superhuman levels of Strength, skill, speed, and endurance. Levels only seen in mythology. Yet, somehow a D&D fighter can do this. The 5e fighter doesn't have exceptional strength, skill, speed, or endurance. At lest not when compared to heroes of myth and legend. This is why there is a disconnect. Just as you wouldn't expect Gimli to be able to solo Smaug in LotR using. Only his axe, you also wouldn't expect a completely mundane warrior to be capable of fighting something like a T-Rex or a dragon.

Why is it that you can suspend your disbelief there, but find having 4 times your normal carrying capacity to be unbelievable? That seems plain silly. Frankly, it is far more believable that a warrior with the strength of 4 men could slay a t-Rex than to believe a perfectly mundane warrior could kill one.

I find the "entirely mundane" part of being a fighter, just like a rogue, is the big drawcard, personally. I love roleplaying fighters and rogues. And I have no complaints in the effective department across any of the "pillars". Just don't "build" for minmax damage and you have plenty of options.

 

[Remathilis]

And being high level lets you rip off monsters' arms, how, exactly?

Same way you cut them off without magic: reduce them to 0 hp and give it a stylish, dramatic description for its death.

Sacrosanct you are having some serious trading comprehension issues here. I never once said the 5e fighter could perform superhuman feats. It can't. It is entirely mundane. And that is the problem

Let's make this clear, to kill a creature like a T-Rex let alone a dragon a human would need superhuman levels of Strength, skill, speed, and endurance. Levels only seen in mythology. Yet, somehow a D&D fighter can do this. The 5e fighter doesn't have exceptional strength, skill, speed, or endurance. At lest not when compared to heroes of myth and legend. This is why there is a disconnect. Just as you wouldn't expect Gimli to be able to solo Smaug in LotR using. Only his axe, you also wouldn't expect a completely mundane warrior to be capable of fighting something like a T-Rex or a dragon.

Why is it that you can suspend your disbelief there, but find having 4 times your normal carrying capacity to be unbelievable? That seems plain silly. Frankly, it is far more believable that a warrior with the strength of 4 men could slay a t-Rex than to believe a perfectly mundane warrior could kill one.

The problem here is what constitutes mundane?

A Human Commoner has a Strength and Con of 10 and 4 hp. A first level human fighter (default array) has a Str of 16 and a Con of 15 and 12 hp. The commoner can carry 150 lbs (a full keg of beer) while the fighter can carry 240 lbs (or four bushel of wheat)! A 10th level fighter (using all his ability mods for Str/Con) has a Str of 20 and a Con of 17, 94 hp, and carries 300 lbs or your average sofa by himself without encumbrance.

We're not talking mundane here, unless you know a lot of guys who can lift and carry a sofa like a beer keg!

Additionally, I don't expect a fighter to solo a dragon; D&D is a team sport. That said, a T-Rex is Challenge 8, so he'd be a solid challenge for a 14th level fighter, barely a sweat for a 17th. He might have to put the sofa down to fight him though.

 

[SteveC]

Is anyone actually claiming that the fighter is bad in combat? I've not seen it. All I've seen is claims that the fighter isn't much better than other "fightery" classes in combat while its very far behind outside of combat.

How much better does a class have to be at combat to utterly lack any class based non-combat abilities? How much is being a 10 in combat worth if we're adjusting the sliders between the three pillars? Is it really worth a 10: 2: 2 class?

I think this is the key. The problem is that the other two pillars don't have enough mechanics behind them for us to really know. What I always wanted to see is an actual mechanical treatment of the exploration and social pillars so that we could really see how they balance out.

At the moment, there are a lot of classes that have abilities that directly affect the other pillars, while the fighter has almost none.

I would really like to see exploration ... explored (sorry) to where we can see why rogues are awesome at it. We can also see explicitly how the fighter can bring something useful to those encounters. The same thing with the social pillar.

In each case, we can have class abilities that directly relate to it, and the fighter would be less effective than other classes, but still have something to bring to the table.

The problem is that even though we have three pillars, the game is still focused primarily around combat, so we look at exploration and social encounters through a combat lens. Because combat is so important, it's been decided that you can't have a class that's really weak at it to make the fighter seem the best.

Those are the problems I see. Sadly the fighter is the "king" of the one thing the game has decided everyone needs to be pretty good at.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You made a claim. You provided a list of characters from myth whom you considered examples of 'mundane' fighter. Your claim. Your list.

Wrong again:

First off, many of the heroes you mention there have significant capabilities both in and out of combat. Far more than what the 5e fighter gets. Secondly, many of the warriors can perform superhuman feats of strength, skill, and endurance.

Sure seems like he's making a claim to me. So I asked him to provide examples of those heroes I listed doing what he said they do. Which he hasn't.

Sacrosanct you are having some serious trading comprehension issues here.

Do you mean "reading" comprehension?

At this point, it's like you guys are living in bizarro world, and probably don't even realize the incredible level of cognitive dissonance you've got going on at this point.

I mean, you still are saying things like "The 5e fighter doesn't have exceptional strength, skill, speed, or endurance. At lest not when compared to heroes of myth and legend." and I just gave you a list of heroes of myth and legend not having anything more powerful than a current 5e fighter has. Which you disagree with but can't actually come up examples of them doing what you said they do.

I think I'm gonna save myself the headache of trying to figure out your massive inconsistencies and just walk away.

 

[Hussar]

Yep. There are no examples of mythological or legendary mundane heroes.


Cuchulain
Alaric the Visigoth
Count Roland
Horatius Cocles
Attila the Hun
Yue Fei
Spartacus
Hannibal Barca
Miyamoto Musashi
Yennenga
Karna
Jason
Hector
Arthur and his knights
Ragnar Lodbrok
etc
etc

And for the record, I don't count any mythological hero descended from gods to count, because PCs aren't typically descended from gods. So wanting the fighter to emulate Hercules or Perseus is flawed from the get go.

Basically, I can want the fighter to emulate heroes from myth and legend and at the same time not want them to emulate heroes that had divine backing behind them and/or had superpowers.

Actually, there is one thing that the heroes on this list (or at least a lot of them) have in common that fighter's as written don't get. They are all leaders of men. Virtually all of these heroes are either kings or generals or some sort of leader.

In 1e, this was shown by fighters getting the best and largest contingent of followers. A 9th level fighter with a keep got something slightly over a hundred loyal soldiers. A nice start to being "leader of men".

A fighter only gets Intimidate as a social skill and gains no knowledge skills. Fighters make very poor leaders of men. It's pretty bad, IMO, when Atilla the Hun or Genghis Khan is better modelled with a bard or a rogue. Would Jason actually even be a fighter? Arthur was the leader of leaders, the king that unifies Britain. Fighters get absolutely nothing from their class which would allow them to do this.

This is the problem that people are talking about Sacrosanct. Yes, you can gain persuasion from your background, true, but, that has nothing to do with being a fighter. I could be a wizard and be just as persuasive and a better leader of men than your fighter because I have access to knowledge skills which makes me a far better tactician than a fighter could be.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yep. There are no examples of mythological or legendary mundane heroes.

Cuchulain
[...]
Miyamoto Musashi
[...]
Karna
Jason
Hector
[...]

And for the record, I don't count any mythological hero descended from gods to count, because PCs aren't typically descended from gods. So wanting the fighter to emulate Hercules or Perseus is flawed from the get go.

Basically, I can want the fighter to emulate heroes from myth and legend and at the same time not want them to emulate heroes that had divine backing behind them and/or had superpowers.

You might want to check your mythologies. Cú Chulainn is the son of Lugh, the god of light. Miyamoto Musashi is of the Fujiwara clan, which intermarried numerous times with the Imperial line, which (historically) claimed direct descent from Amaterasu, so he might or might not be of divine heritage. Karna is the son of Surya, the Hindu sun god. Jason was the great-grandson of Hellen (not to be confused with Helen--this is a dude) and the nymph Orseis (daughter of Oceanus, Zeus, or some river-god I'd never heard of). Hector was of the Trojan royal family, and thus descended from both Dardanus (son of Zeus and Elektra) and from Tros (grandson of Dardanus) who married a daughter of Simoeis, the river-god of the Trojan river-plain.

I couldn't track down the lineage of Ragnar, though it would seem at least one of his important ancestors appeared out of nowhere as an infant. Arthur, in his modern depiction, doesn't have any real 'superpowers,' but his old Welsh origins absolutely depict him as interacting with the supernatural on a regular basis and leading a posse of "superhero" warrior-types (check this page, do a search for "superhero"). Plus, his father Uther may even have been a sorcerer--there are tales that suggest he is the origin of one of the "Three Great Enchantments" of Britain, and that originally it was Uther himself who did the transformative magic to trick Igraine (with Merlin being a later, French substitution). Horatius Cocles was generally believed--even in the days of Rome, such as in the writings of Livy--to be either made up, or to be an extremely aggrandized version of whatever actually occurred, because even the people of his day found the story implausible.

And much of the rest of your list...isn't actually people from myth or legend. Hannibal? Spartacus? Purely historical figures--or, at least, I've never heard a single "myth" told about them (not in the same way people tell myths about Hercules or Perseus, anyway). Alaric, Yue Fei, and Attila didn't get myths told about them either: they had histories written about them. Roland is sort of an edge case, as he is limitedly present in historical texts, but pretty heavily romanticized.

So that's a third of your list that doesn't (or at least might not) meet your own requirements, a few more were seen as beyond the mundane to the people who originally told the stories, 1500-2000 years ago, and another third that don't meet the "myth and legend" bit in the first place.

Not that I think that "I can list a bunch of mythical, historical, or mixed mythical-historical people who were awesome and mundane" actually defeats the comment you responded to. "The Fighter should be able to emulate historical warriors" is not in any way incompatible with "the Fighter should be able to emulate many heroic archetypes of history, myth, and legend."

 

[Minigiant]

I hate repeating myself but D&D has some of them most powerful environments and foes in the highest quantity. This is a rarity. Many fantasy settings barely has more than a dozen humaniods living at one time and active in the world with more that 7-8 levels. And when the number of major threats and powerful humaniods grow, the rarer the nonmagical mundane mortal who matches up with them appears.

The D&D fighter is actually an anomaly as it goes all the way up to high levels and is expected to fight those same threats. Off the top of my head, the only fantasy worlds were mundanes stay relevant in a world of high quantity super monsters are D&D and Dresden. And it works in the Drsdenverse because mages "suck at tech", double tapping a nonbulletproof something in the head works (DPR), and Butcher made all the supernaturals... crazy or jerks.

 

[Manbearcat]

I mean, you still are saying things like "The 5e fighter doesn't have exceptional strength, skill, speed, or endurance. At lest not when compared to heroes of myth and legend." and I just gave you a list of heroes of myth and legend not having anything more powerful than a current 5e fighter has.

I think the contention is pretty clear and it isn't about combat prowess. It is about the noncombat prowess of high mid to epic level fighters not remotely making any sense relative to their combat prowess...or when considered in context with the setting as a whole. It is about the incoherency of the inclination toward binding the D&D archetype of the Fighter/Fighting Man by our world metrics (lifting, running, leaping, etc) and our world physics (eg 1 earth gravity and the same atmospheric conditions). It is typically done on the basis of "versimilitude" but it couldn't be less "versimilitudinous" because it is nonsensical. I made the contention in the other thread and was hoping for some engagement on it, but there was none.

1) If a human in our world physically faces down a tiger or a grizzly bear and lives to tell the tale (forget about slaying it), the encounter quickly becomes legend. Naturally, we assume (and rightly so), that this person's physical prowess and mental/physical prowess is far beyond the extraordinary.

D&D Fighters with a few levels do this routinely, over and over, and with relative ease. If this were to happen in our real world, we would assume, and rightly so, that this person's physical prowess is basically supernatural. We would assume that they can leap higher, lift more, move faster, go for longer than any man (by a fair stretch) in human history. We would, rightly, assume they must be utterly unflinching at the prospect of anything that should produce paralyzing fear.

2) D&D mid-high and epic level Fighters come face to, well, ankle, with Tyrannosaurs. And slay them. This is one of the (if not THE) apex land predator in earth's history. It is a creature of such size, strength, sprinting speed, killing capacity, and sheer ferocity that the idea of a human doing anything but running for their lives from it (without the aid of an extremely high-cal mini-gun...and even with that...) strikes us as beyond absurd. Assuming a T-Rex were available, if someone were to say to you "that dude over there waded into melee with a T-Rex and took it down...and then ate a sandwich", you would think one of two things; (1) this guy is delusional or (2) that dude must have supernatural strength, agility, speed, toughness, mettle, what-have-you.

D&D Fighters of requisite level can do the former (wading into melee with a T-Rex and slaying them) routinely. Yet they are supposed to have very mundane, height-of-human-capacity (and with several GMs who just don't have the slightest clue about what humans are actually capable of...less than height of human capacity) on this here earth physical capacity.

3) Elder/Ancient Red Dragons have a different name for T-Rexes. Afternoon snack. They are 2 * the size, 10 * the weight, unimaginably stronger and more ferocious, possess god-like intellegence, their scales are tank-like, they can fly, cast high level spells and breath giant cones of incinerating fire.

These are the foes that Epic Fighters engage with in melee.

But these same Fighters have about the same vertical leap, broad jump, the same reflexes (or worse), and run the 100 meter in the same time as I did (a well-above-average human athlete, but nothing special) 13 years ago. There are sixty year old men on this planet who have more stamina than some epic level fighters produce in the fiction of some D&D tables. That paradigm is absolutely ridiculous with respect to "versimilitude." Yet it persists.

4) Then when you consider the physical conditions of the world those Fighters inhabit and the utterly mundane creatures they inhabit it with, things get really, really squirelly from a versimilitude perspective. It seems that D&D mechanics that work so hard to bind the Fighter to pinnacle human limits are working off the premise that the setting possesses the same atmospheric conditions of our planet and 1 Earth Gravity. Ok, fair enough.

But then how in the hell do we have an evolutionary process (or just a spontaneous creation process...whatever) that is ok with (a) exoskeleton-having creatures being larger than a turkey (let alone of gargatuan size or larger) and (b) dragons being able to (mundanely) take to the air. These are only two situation, but they are huge ones in the D&D setting (as exoskeletons are everywhere and flying dragons are shtick numero uno).

So we're good with 1 earth gravity and earth atmospheric conditions for the Fighter...but it is just going to "take 5" for all these other, prolific setting elements. And when the Fighter shares the same stage as them? I guess we're forced to not observe that The Emperor Has No Clothes (as we do with so much other stuff...except for Fighter's noncombat prowess of course!)...for...you know...versimilitude.

Head. Spinning.

 

[Remathilis]

But these same Fighters have about the same vertical leap, broad jump, the same reflexes (or worse), and run the 100 meter in the same time as I did (a well-above-average human athlete, but nothing special) 13 years ago. There are sixty year old men on this planet who have more stamina than some epic level fighters produce in the fiction of some D&D tables. That paradigm is absolutely ridiculous with respect to "versimilitude." Yet it persists.

This has more to do with some odd choices in the formula's used to figure out these things than anything.

A human fighter has a Strength of 20. By RAW, he can long jump 20 feet and high jump 8 feet. By the records, he's on par with an Olympic High Jump record (8 1/2 ft) but woefully short on long jump (29 1/2 ft), his jump is on par with your average High School Track and Field Student. This isn't a problem created by verisimilitude, this is purely the designers not noticing that their "simple" jump rule doesn't even match mundane records.

A fighter with a 20 Strength can lift a small (250 lbs) and not be encumbered. Let that sink in; He can strap a loveseat to his back and still be able to carry a few weapon and a snack and march around. That's GODLIKE Stamina. Sure, lots of World's Strongest guys can deadlift far more weight, but carry it unencumbered? Can you imagine quadruple that? He could carry a telephone pole (1,000 lbs!) with him!

Yet he can't run any faster for all his Str and Endurance than a Commoner (30 ft, 60 with dash). There is no correlation between Strength, Constitution and Speed. The best he can do is hope he gets into a chase and then have a higher Con (Dash 3 + Con Mod) to overtake him.

So it isn't necessarily that fighter's an't epic on their own, its that the default rules had poor ways of showing it. Fixing the rules rather than epicizing the fighter would go a long way to shoring up some of these problems. However, then you lose the simplicity. Catch 22.

 

[Minigiant]

Want to make your head really spin.

In D&D, high level fighters just don't fight T-Rexes, dragons, and giants.

In D&D, high level fighters just don't fight multiple T-Rexes, dragons, and giants or they can't increase in power.

5th edition is the first edition where a high level PC might go back to fighting orcs and think twice about it.

Normally Sir Knight and Friends storm a whole castle full of giants the size of houses. Then they take a vacation for a few months. After boredom sets in, Sir Knight tells Optimus Prime to relax and he and his pals go kill 30 Deceptions. And if they don't retire after that, there are 3 different Underworlds of giant magic fiends to beat up.

D&D is nuts. Most mythical nonmagical mortal heroes would get there butts handed to them if the acted like a D&D fighter. And many of the demigod heroes would eat it as well. D&D campaigns are what people call suicide missions. Sanity ends between level 8 and 10 if the DM doesn't intervene. And we don't bat an eye. Bring on the car sized flying monsters which breathes acid and uses magic, I need to level and my pointy metal stick only slayed 4 of them this year.

The fighter's legacy is having access to all the "mundane" combat features to make the above sort of make sense.