Celebrim
Legend
So I want to try to tackle the linear fighter/quadratic wizard problem under my own terms. This is going to take a while. I realize as I sit down to write this that I could require 20 pages to even describe what I’m thinking.
I believe that there are solutions, but they require moving the game from the direction it has been going the last 20 years. Basically, all existing attempted solutions to the problem turn fighters into spell-casters mechanically, embracing the idea of using time limited powers to impose reliable narration. This has kind of gone hand in hand with a gradual erosion of the Exploration of pillar of D&D and a focus on combat as being the core of the game, which serves to hide the problem effectively since martial classes have always been able to impact combat well. The majority demands to fix the problem demand leaning into and doubling down on this approach and treat any dissent from that approach as “martial classes can’t have good things”. This criticism is to put it mildly, unhelpful.
The problem with turning martial classes into spellcasters is that you’ve solved the problem by erasing martial classes. A lot of the other proposed solutions have similar problems.
The one area that there has been positive direction in addressing is attempting to tone down spell-casters, but mostly this has been focused on removing the Exploration pillar of the game and making spell-casters more like 3e Warlocks that are basically just ranged attackers. This attempt to balance combat has had some success, especially when combined with “everyone is a spell-caster”, but it is I think not satisfying to everyone for some obvious reasons. What I do think is important is to realize that the problem is not just that martial classes aren’t being realized correctly, but that spell-casters are part of the design problem.
To begin with, let’s look at one thing that D&D has IMO done right when modelling martial heroes – hit points. One the defining characteristics of any martial hero throughout history has been their ability to survive situations that would have killed a “lesser man”. If you watch any sort of action movie, one of the tropes is that the hero suffers massive trauma but in moments is back to fighting with renewed vigor despite taking blows that should have killed him. This is true of everything from Rocky to Captain America and all the range in between. One of the best examples of this is the ability of high-level fighters to survive falls from basically any height. This is actually strong genera emulation, as if you watch anything from First Blood, to Die Hard, to Winter Soldier you’ll see examples of the protagonist falling a height which is logically greater than the claimed resistance of the character to avoid injury. The great fall is a stable of heroic fiction, and a dramatic visual proof of the toughness of the character, to the point where Aragorn gets a movie and has to be made to have multiple conventional great falls to show he's a hero. D&D gets surviving a fall is a hero thing perfectly.
But there are two points this observation raises. First, a good portion of the player base of D&D has always treated “people can survive long falls without magic” as being a serious problem, as they press for gritty realism as the key to emersion or whatever problems you are having at the table. They have an aesthetic of play that wants martial heroes to be the peer of spell-casters, but at the same time insists that martials not be allowed to do anything that isn’t mundane in order to keep the game grounded and feeling believable. And while I do see that point of view and think that they are correct in bemoaning how much D&D has gotten away from the gritty era of torches, 10’ poles, and iron rations I think they are also being very selective about what they are willing to accept into the game based solely on historical precedent and not what is being simulated. I think that if you really want to keep the game grounded in casual realism, you really need to keep the game to under 5th level where the mechanics of the game support that. We can do more to extend the casual realism into higher level play, but only so much. And it’s not just increasing access to spells that breaks that, but the increasing hit points that let players shrug when someone points a crossbow at them or leap off a 50’ cliff confident that the tactical advantage of doing so outweighs the lost hit points. These things, which are often treated as problems, are not IMO problems. They are just the result of increasing the tier of play. Once you get above 5th level, you are moving into Action Movie Hero genera where realism is starting to take a back seat to dramatic coolness and by the time you hit 10th level you are moving into superhero genera where characters can do clearly superhuman things that you can’t brush off with just the sort of suspension of disbelief you reserve for Rambo or Die Hard.
The second point that this raises is that spellcasters have been having their cake and eating it too for the last 20 years and in many ways the problem is getting worse and not better. For example, I mentioned that hit points were one of the areas that D&D got right. But over time, the gap in heroic durability between a fighter and a wizard has been decreasing, so that I can no longer say that that is true. The truth as I’ve experienced it is that in 40 years of playing 1e and 3e I’ve never once seen a single classed wizard or sorcerer survive play for any length of time. Especially in 1e they were just too squishy. Try levelling up a M-U from 1st level to 10th level and see what I mean. You were always one combat round from death. You had no reserve of hit points ever. One peer level foe getting to you and rolling well would kill you. Check out one of the several the hidden powers of the 1e Fighter: you get full bonuses to CON from 17 or 18 CON. Bonus hit points on other classes topped out at +2. M-U’s topped out around 35-55 hit points, and then gain just one per level after that. They were glass cannons, who were often threatened with death even on passed saves. Full hit points was no protection. They could just get dropped. Fighters often had more hit points left after taking enough damage to kill a M-U than the M-U had.
My experience with 1e and especially 1e post Unearthed Arcana is that fighters just ruled large portions of play with such massive advantages in hit points, easier access to high AC, saving throws, and THAC0 that they were juggernauts.
Over time D&D’s designers have been bowing to pressure to make playing a spellcaster more like playing an action movie hero with big reserves of hit points that keep them from being squishy. Gone are the days when hit points were a big advantage of fighters, buried under the number inflation that has impacted every aspect of the game. If you are going to give spellcasters hit points and turn them into bricks, don’t be surprised when the bricks no longer shine as part of the team. I mean even the THAC0 advantage once held by fighters has been seriously eroded to the point it's not a big deal. The whole gamut of advantages fighters once had is largely gone. They don't have better saves or noticeably better and easier to stack AC or anything they once add.
And in the opposite direction, spells have been getting easier and easier to cast. They no longer take 15 seconds of chanting and waving your arms. They no longer require the character to take a fixed position, nor do they leave the player defenseless while doing them. Think about the difference in casting a spell in book ‘Harry Potter’, versus the movie ‘Harry Potter’ where wands turn into magical firearms that unleash barrages as quick as winking. In the mind’s eye of the player, they should be instantaneous acts of will. In the mind’s eye of the player, spells should be cast as quickly as pulling a gun and with the ballet like elegance of gun-fu. And not surprisingly, letting spellcaster’s do this has taken away a big advantage of hitting things with pointy sticks well. Spellcasters are getting more and more goodies as they lose more and more restrictions.
Part of fixing this problem is making spellcasting suck a little more, but I’ll leave that topic at least partially to a different thread.
The rest of this problem is making sure that Fighters are brought into the modern rules set rather than being left out in the cold by fear and neglect of what has been created. The trouble that fighters have had since 3e is that designers largely imported spells as is, or “as is” with all the drawbacks crafted into them in 1e/2e removed, so in general spells got even better than their original versions. But when the 3e and later designers looked at new concepts like skills and feats, they generally aired on the side of caution, paring them down to things of marginal importance and marginal utility. Feats in general weren’t worth as much as spell slots, and people that got feats generally didn’t get as many as spell slots, or everyone got pretty close to the same number of skills and feats even though they didn't get nearly close to the same number of spell slots. Skills in conception were thought of primarily as binary pass/fail mechanics for getting through DM created gates, and not as true powers or abilities. And all skills, regardless of what they were, were shoe-horned into this single “elegant” system and thus what was a skill and what it did tended to be minimized. Designers were very conservative about what you could do with a skill and particularly how much skill you needed to have before you could do epic superhuman things.
Fixing this in my opinion requires applying a number of important principles which I’ll list before trying to explain what they actually mean.
a) Feats are a fighter’s spells.
b) All martial classes in D&D are skill monkeys.
c) The important martial skills tend not to be of the pass/fail sort, but the sort that add to the character in a quantitative way (in a way few or no skills in D&D yet does).
d) Any spell that duplicates a skill needs to be balanced against having that skill.
e) Combat balance problems are easy; exploration balance problems are hard.
f) If you want real balance, spell-casters need to be made to feel the pain.
What those principles mean is by no means obvious. I’ll delve into the first of them in the next post.
I believe that there are solutions, but they require moving the game from the direction it has been going the last 20 years. Basically, all existing attempted solutions to the problem turn fighters into spell-casters mechanically, embracing the idea of using time limited powers to impose reliable narration. This has kind of gone hand in hand with a gradual erosion of the Exploration of pillar of D&D and a focus on combat as being the core of the game, which serves to hide the problem effectively since martial classes have always been able to impact combat well. The majority demands to fix the problem demand leaning into and doubling down on this approach and treat any dissent from that approach as “martial classes can’t have good things”. This criticism is to put it mildly, unhelpful.
The problem with turning martial classes into spellcasters is that you’ve solved the problem by erasing martial classes. A lot of the other proposed solutions have similar problems.
The one area that there has been positive direction in addressing is attempting to tone down spell-casters, but mostly this has been focused on removing the Exploration pillar of the game and making spell-casters more like 3e Warlocks that are basically just ranged attackers. This attempt to balance combat has had some success, especially when combined with “everyone is a spell-caster”, but it is I think not satisfying to everyone for some obvious reasons. What I do think is important is to realize that the problem is not just that martial classes aren’t being realized correctly, but that spell-casters are part of the design problem.
To begin with, let’s look at one thing that D&D has IMO done right when modelling martial heroes – hit points. One the defining characteristics of any martial hero throughout history has been their ability to survive situations that would have killed a “lesser man”. If you watch any sort of action movie, one of the tropes is that the hero suffers massive trauma but in moments is back to fighting with renewed vigor despite taking blows that should have killed him. This is true of everything from Rocky to Captain America and all the range in between. One of the best examples of this is the ability of high-level fighters to survive falls from basically any height. This is actually strong genera emulation, as if you watch anything from First Blood, to Die Hard, to Winter Soldier you’ll see examples of the protagonist falling a height which is logically greater than the claimed resistance of the character to avoid injury. The great fall is a stable of heroic fiction, and a dramatic visual proof of the toughness of the character, to the point where Aragorn gets a movie and has to be made to have multiple conventional great falls to show he's a hero. D&D gets surviving a fall is a hero thing perfectly.
But there are two points this observation raises. First, a good portion of the player base of D&D has always treated “people can survive long falls without magic” as being a serious problem, as they press for gritty realism as the key to emersion or whatever problems you are having at the table. They have an aesthetic of play that wants martial heroes to be the peer of spell-casters, but at the same time insists that martials not be allowed to do anything that isn’t mundane in order to keep the game grounded and feeling believable. And while I do see that point of view and think that they are correct in bemoaning how much D&D has gotten away from the gritty era of torches, 10’ poles, and iron rations I think they are also being very selective about what they are willing to accept into the game based solely on historical precedent and not what is being simulated. I think that if you really want to keep the game grounded in casual realism, you really need to keep the game to under 5th level where the mechanics of the game support that. We can do more to extend the casual realism into higher level play, but only so much. And it’s not just increasing access to spells that breaks that, but the increasing hit points that let players shrug when someone points a crossbow at them or leap off a 50’ cliff confident that the tactical advantage of doing so outweighs the lost hit points. These things, which are often treated as problems, are not IMO problems. They are just the result of increasing the tier of play. Once you get above 5th level, you are moving into Action Movie Hero genera where realism is starting to take a back seat to dramatic coolness and by the time you hit 10th level you are moving into superhero genera where characters can do clearly superhuman things that you can’t brush off with just the sort of suspension of disbelief you reserve for Rambo or Die Hard.
The second point that this raises is that spellcasters have been having their cake and eating it too for the last 20 years and in many ways the problem is getting worse and not better. For example, I mentioned that hit points were one of the areas that D&D got right. But over time, the gap in heroic durability between a fighter and a wizard has been decreasing, so that I can no longer say that that is true. The truth as I’ve experienced it is that in 40 years of playing 1e and 3e I’ve never once seen a single classed wizard or sorcerer survive play for any length of time. Especially in 1e they were just too squishy. Try levelling up a M-U from 1st level to 10th level and see what I mean. You were always one combat round from death. You had no reserve of hit points ever. One peer level foe getting to you and rolling well would kill you. Check out one of the several the hidden powers of the 1e Fighter: you get full bonuses to CON from 17 or 18 CON. Bonus hit points on other classes topped out at +2. M-U’s topped out around 35-55 hit points, and then gain just one per level after that. They were glass cannons, who were often threatened with death even on passed saves. Full hit points was no protection. They could just get dropped. Fighters often had more hit points left after taking enough damage to kill a M-U than the M-U had.
My experience with 1e and especially 1e post Unearthed Arcana is that fighters just ruled large portions of play with such massive advantages in hit points, easier access to high AC, saving throws, and THAC0 that they were juggernauts.
Over time D&D’s designers have been bowing to pressure to make playing a spellcaster more like playing an action movie hero with big reserves of hit points that keep them from being squishy. Gone are the days when hit points were a big advantage of fighters, buried under the number inflation that has impacted every aspect of the game. If you are going to give spellcasters hit points and turn them into bricks, don’t be surprised when the bricks no longer shine as part of the team. I mean even the THAC0 advantage once held by fighters has been seriously eroded to the point it's not a big deal. The whole gamut of advantages fighters once had is largely gone. They don't have better saves or noticeably better and easier to stack AC or anything they once add.
And in the opposite direction, spells have been getting easier and easier to cast. They no longer take 15 seconds of chanting and waving your arms. They no longer require the character to take a fixed position, nor do they leave the player defenseless while doing them. Think about the difference in casting a spell in book ‘Harry Potter’, versus the movie ‘Harry Potter’ where wands turn into magical firearms that unleash barrages as quick as winking. In the mind’s eye of the player, they should be instantaneous acts of will. In the mind’s eye of the player, spells should be cast as quickly as pulling a gun and with the ballet like elegance of gun-fu. And not surprisingly, letting spellcaster’s do this has taken away a big advantage of hitting things with pointy sticks well. Spellcasters are getting more and more goodies as they lose more and more restrictions.
Part of fixing this problem is making spellcasting suck a little more, but I’ll leave that topic at least partially to a different thread.
The rest of this problem is making sure that Fighters are brought into the modern rules set rather than being left out in the cold by fear and neglect of what has been created. The trouble that fighters have had since 3e is that designers largely imported spells as is, or “as is” with all the drawbacks crafted into them in 1e/2e removed, so in general spells got even better than their original versions. But when the 3e and later designers looked at new concepts like skills and feats, they generally aired on the side of caution, paring them down to things of marginal importance and marginal utility. Feats in general weren’t worth as much as spell slots, and people that got feats generally didn’t get as many as spell slots, or everyone got pretty close to the same number of skills and feats even though they didn't get nearly close to the same number of spell slots. Skills in conception were thought of primarily as binary pass/fail mechanics for getting through DM created gates, and not as true powers or abilities. And all skills, regardless of what they were, were shoe-horned into this single “elegant” system and thus what was a skill and what it did tended to be minimized. Designers were very conservative about what you could do with a skill and particularly how much skill you needed to have before you could do epic superhuman things.
Fixing this in my opinion requires applying a number of important principles which I’ll list before trying to explain what they actually mean.
a) Feats are a fighter’s spells.
b) All martial classes in D&D are skill monkeys.
c) The important martial skills tend not to be of the pass/fail sort, but the sort that add to the character in a quantitative way (in a way few or no skills in D&D yet does).
d) Any spell that duplicates a skill needs to be balanced against having that skill.
e) Combat balance problems are easy; exploration balance problems are hard.
f) If you want real balance, spell-casters need to be made to feel the pain.
What those principles mean is by no means obvious. I’ll delve into the first of them in the next post.
