D&D 5E The Magical Martial

[Gammadoodler]

how about not limiting either gives you more options?

Agreed.

Haven't argued for limitations on magic equipment, just that 5e doesn't have good support for when or how a PC should get it or what they should get.

Thus magic items aren't bad, but class resources are better.

 

[nevin]

Wasn't that in Batman vs. Superman?


What "supernatural abilities"? I mean what you consider to be Fighters and Rogues in your D&D fantasy game. If you feel they have already (or should have) such abilities, then they do. If you feel the don't, then they don't.


Which was why I excluded magic items from my prior post.

Much of what was magical about PCs in AD&D, for instance, was the magical items they got. Otherwise, they would never be able to defeat an adult dragon (well, in 2E anyway...).

I can completely envision a 20th-level Fighter with magical armor, weapons, etc. doing battle with a dragon toe-to-toe because his class and levels give him the ability, but his magical items are what offer the additional offensive and defensive oomph needed to survive such a fight, let alone win.

Batman vs Superman was normal human with a lifetime of extraordinary training and unlimited supertech that was developed in part by reverse engineering advanced alien including kryptonian technology. Don't think I'd call that normal person versus god which is pretty much what superman equates to in D&D. Best Case as you said it would be the equivilant of 20th level D&D fighter with best magic items available and probably multiple relics and artifacts to boot.

But you can do that in a D&D game with the right magical Item Gear if you ignore the attunement limitations and just let the fighter go hog wild.

 

[nevin]

Agreed.

Haven't argued for limitations on magic equipment, just that 5e doesn't have good support for when or how a PC should get it or what they should get.

Thus magic items aren't bad, but class resources are better.

because it's supposed to have a DM controlling all the details, instead of being a micromanaged game with 7 or 8 full rule books telling you what to do in every concievable situation.

 

[Gammadoodler]

because it's supposed to have a DM controlling all the details, instead of being a micromanaged game with 7 or 8 full rule books telling you what to do in every concievable situation.

That would be more persuasive if half of the existing rules content weren't made up of spells that do exactly that .

 

[nevin]

That would be more persuasive if half the rules content weren't made up of spells that do exactly that .

And if you go look through my posts you'll see that spells are the one thing I've argued needs to be completely reworked after nearly 50 year's of Ad-Hoc naughty word. But what I get from your response is you want a rule book just to give fighters a similar experience to looking through all the spells everytime you try to plan anything which is arguably the absolutely worst part of D&D. But making all the rules as dysfunctional as our spell lists might be the one thing that could kill D&D as a game.

 

[Gammadoodler]

And if you go look through my posts you'll see that spells are the one thing I've argued needs to be completely reworked after nearly 50 year's of Ad-Hoc naughty word. But what I get from your response is you want a rule book just to give fighters a similar experience to looking through all the spells everytime you try to plan anything which is arguably the absolutely worst part of D&D. But making all the rules as dysfunctional as our spell lists might be the one thing that could kill D&D as a game.

What I ultimately would like to see is parity in the level of control the player has in how they increase in overall power.

If it's "trust the DM to manage it", then let's do that. If it's "let the rulebook lead the way", then let's do that. But whichever way we go, let's do it the same for everyone.

What is difficult to abide is that one group gets to rely on a constant, while the other group has to rely on a variable.

An argument for rulebook brevity just doesn't work when the amount of rules content classes get from those rules varies so drastically.

Edit: note that this level of control would only apply to something like 'magic items' as the martial power sources where there is a significant diversity of magical weapons to choose from. I would be perfectly happy if martials just got more relevant high-level abilities. If the same obstacles a fighter faces at level 5 (walls, pits hordes) were significantly less impactful at level 20.

 

[nevin]

What I ultimately would like to see is parity in the level of control the player has in how they increase in overall power.

If it's trust the DM to manage it, then let's do that. If it's let the rulebook lead the way, then let's do that. But whichever way we go, let's do it the same for everyone.

What is difficult to abide is that one group gets to rely on a constant, while the other group has to rely on a variable.

it's all variables from the DM side of the table. With different classes and different abilities the DM has to control the magical item supply and dm specials etc etc. But with current D&D rules if your DM ignores magic items, or just generate random ones instead of planning them for your party then you'll have miserable players. I've seen that go both ways. I've seen martials with special items that marginalized the wizard and the wizard with a bag full of stuff that was all useless to him because his spells were better and easier and he ended up being the party bank, when they needed money they sold his stuff. DM is the one thing that makes or breaks this game and never going to fix that with rules.
You can't have traditional D&D with a comprehensive set of rules that cover every situation because then it's a different game. D&D's appeal is the DM can do anything and the rules don't say no. Wanna jump to our modern world sure, wanna go to gamma world all right, wanna go to Olympus have fun. And all of those options would require a ton of work by DM to make it possible to be fun for everyone. I really feel like this entire thread is the old we need enough rules to fix the Bad DM's. Problem is that many rules breaks the good DM's or causes them to refuse to play by the rules and then you have a more fractured base and possibly affect sales. What you want isn't likely to happen because most customers are happy with what they have. Why rework the rules for the most popular class? Why would the company reengineer thier best product as far as classes go?

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

This is an argument about taste. It's subjective. It comes down to verisimilitude: what feels believable to people in their stories.

Let's go with the example of the 100' leap that was proffered earlier as an example of what a fighter should eventually be able to do baseline. I'll add another: being able to lift a car, or weight equal to a car, over their heads.

For me, those are firmly in superhero territory. If I see that in a movie, I need some kind of explanation. I'm not just buying it as something people can do. If Conan suddenly leaps over a 100' gap, verisimilitude is out the window. Although it's a fantasy setting, that does not mean that anything goes.

Or take the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. We have Peter Quill hanging out with a bunch of superheroes. When Drax can crumple a robot in his hands like it is tissue, I'm fine with it, because we've established that he's a super strong alien. If Quill did it, I would need a reason or I'm not buying in. When Peter jumps long distances, it's fine because we see his little jet boots go off, or whatever. I don't need the schematics for them, I just need to know that they are there, so that I'm not taken out of the story.

However, the film finishes with a bit of a mystery - it seems like Peter is able to handle an infinity stone just through the power of friendship. And thus the second film establishes that there is a reason for this: he's not as mundane as we thought.

Batman is generally presented as a regular human capable of super heroic feats through intense training and mechanical contraptions. Again, if we look hard at this, it seems very unlikely that an actual human could achieve some of his feats. But the writers and artists generally try to maintain that conceit. If Batman just randomly picked up a car and threw it at someone, we would assume that he had added a powered exoskeleton to the bat suit, or had otherwise acquired extra-human powers. If he jumps a 100' chasm, we see the batwings unfurl so he can glide. If he did it in his underwear, we would be puzzled, and verisimilitude would be lost - we would have fallen out of the story. In The Dark Knight Returns Frank Miller goes to great lengths to show how this mundane person could possibly fight Superman.

For me, and evidently for a lot of folks, it is important that D&D keep room for characters who are mundane people. Who can keep up, right to level 20, while not needing obviously supernatural powers. Quibbling about what feats or abilities, etc. logically have to be superhuman, and implying that therefore our taste is subjective and wrong, is missing the point entirely. Everyone's taste is subjective and wrong, much of the time, to everyone else. In a game targeted to mass appeal, like 5e, the priority is to make it work for the majority.

The 5e fighter patently does that. It is, by a wide margin, the most popular class in the game. It is widely considered a strong class, as demonstrated by its popularity and persistent placement towards the middle and upper placements in class tier rankings. Many of us have pointed out that we see it working well in our games, and in actual play shows. It scratches the itch it was designed to scratch, not for everyone, but for a whole lot of people.

And the thing I find most curious is that this discussion keeps ignoring the fact that there are plenty of options for those who want to play a fighter and have supernatural abilities. You can be a pure fighter and blink across a 100' chasm all day long as an Echo Knight. You can be a Psi Warrior and lift ridiculously huge things over your head and make giant leaps and such. It's already in the rules.

What this argument comes down to is folks claiming that their subjective taste is not well reflected in the rules, fair enough, but also then spending dozens and dozens of pages explaining, often very condescendingly, why their subjective taste is actually objectively correct.

Wizards are already superheroic. The problem is that if you want to be a superheroic character you have to limit yourself to playing casters.

You can have your grounded martials if we can have our super heroic martials. Except, of course, you would argue very hard against adding properly balanced martials even if you could keep your mundane classes. You would seek every justification to deny other people this option because you clearly don't want anyone to have it.

I, at least, do not want to limit you. It is you who wants to limit me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The parts of fantasy that make it fantasy are the 'cool' parts.

If you want "coherent" grounded worldbuilding, you don't need elves or dragons or magic swords or rings of power or undead gods or white walkers, skinchangers, demigods, enchanted woods, sorcerer kings, talking trees or any of the that.

And in point of fact, most all of those things actively interfere with the kind of worldbuilding you seem to prefer.

So what's the point?

You say cool stuff can't exist 'simply' because it is cool, it must have some other reason to be there.

So what's your reason?

You regularly engage in pretending to participate in a fantasy world with fantasy stuff in it. Why do you need that fantasy world or that fantasy stuff?

Have you ever engaged with any existing fantasy property? How many of them are "literally anything goes, as long as its cool". Much of the time, the "cool" stuff has rules and reasons to exist within the framework of the setting.

And I never said "grounded", although parts of most settings tend to be so they are relatable to the audience. I said, "coherent". I am honestly having a hard time even understanding how we are even having this conversation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wasn't that in Batman vs. Superman?


What "supernatural abilities"? I mean what you consider to be Fighters and Rogues in your D&D fantasy game. If you feel they have already (or should have) such abilities, then they do. If you feel the don't, then they don't.


Which was why I excluded magic items from my prior post.

Much of what was magical about PCs in AD&D, for instance, was the magical items they got. Otherwise, they would never be able to defeat an adult dragon (well, in 2E anyway...).

I can completely envision a 20th-level Fighter with magical armor, weapons, etc. doing battle with a dragon toe-to-toe because his class and levels give him the ability, but his magical items are what offer the additional offensive and defensive oomph needed to survive such a fight, let alone win.

I can't see fighting most or perhaps any of those creatures successfully without some kind of supernatural or technological edge, whether provided by gear or built into the character some other way.