Transcending the mundane. How to make martial classes epic.

[B.T.]

The point is, that in itself isn't balanced, so how do you go about balancing spot light between the player of a 'mundane' class and the player of a magical class?

Nerf wizards.

 

[Celebrim]

Nerf wizards.

Which leaves us with a game where no class feels epic.

 

[mmadsen]

Designing 'mundane' classes is always extraordinarily hard compared to designing classes that can do anything mechanically you are willing to justify. Mundane classes are forced to adhere harder to casual versimilitude and casual realism than a class which gets to opt out of realism by default. Also when you create a mundane class, you are under some pressure to create a class that also works in a setting without magic. If someone wants to run a D&D game in the real world antiquity (and no magic), then you don't want to force them to use a class where magic is implied. And its inherently hard to balance mundane with magical without making the mundane feel like just a variant spellcasting class - especially at higher levels.

I feel like I almost agree with most of that, because it should be true -- but I don't think the designers of D&D's mundane classes have ever given much thought to realism, beyond not giving Fighters magic powers, or to non-magical settings.

Using D&D as the basis for a non-magical swashbuckling or gun-fighting setting just doesn't work without everyone agreeing to make it work.

First, I think it needs to be realized by designers that above about 6th level, you are no longer talking mundane. Above 6th level, you've at least moved into the realm of 'action movie hero' where falls which would kill or cripple a mundane person cause minimal injury, and traumatic wounds are recieved without anything but momentary discomfort. You've entered the realm of Rambo and John McClane (from Diehard). Therefore, if games are set in antiquity without magic AND the DM is also allowing for high level play, then you are also entering into the power level of Samson, Heracles, Achilles and the like regardless of whether magic is available. A 20th level fighter is not equivalent to a mundane hero or champion.

The problem is that there are many, many way to define someone as heroic, in the action-movie sense, and D&D's definition revolves around taking many, many hard shots to go down. If we were designing a Hollywood-western RPG, for instance, that wouldn't be our chief heroic trait.

If you didn't know how D&D worked, but you knew that a 4th-level character was supposed to be a hero, you wouldn't immediately define him as able to take four times as many bullets, +20% accuracy, etc.

He would be awesome by almost always hitting, even while shooting blindingly fast and getting shot at. Ordinary city-slickers might have a 1-in-20 chance of hitting, while he'd have a 19-in 20 chance of hitting.

In fact, the defining trait of a hero, across many genres, is bravery. Bravery stands out to me as (a) lacking in D&D, for the most part, and (b) profoundly important in both real and fictional combat. In a gun-fight, the difference between the "high-level" and "low-level" characters is that the true gun-fighters can and will keep their nerve enough to hold their gun steady, to focus on the front sight, and to smoothly control the trigger, rather than jerk the trigger with the gun poking out from behind cover.

 

[Celebrim]

I feel like I almost agree with most of that, because it should be true -- but I don't think the designers of D&D's mundane classes have ever given much thought to realism, beyond not giving Fighters magic powers, or to non-magical settings.

I don't know how much thought the designers of D&D's mundane classes have given to realism or even to what they did give thought. I do know however that early on in D&D's history there was an assumption that D&D's classes could be used successfully to model a great many settings, including non-magical real world ones. This is evident IMO by reading early Dragon magazine, or by examining the 1st DMG, or what is known about Gygax's actual campaigns (Robilar, for example, carried pistols).

Using D&D as the basis for a non-magical swashbuckling or gun-fighting setting just doesn't work without everyone agreeing to make it work.

I would argue that this is true regardless of rules set.

The problem is that there are many, many way to define someone as heroic, in the action-movie sense, and D&D's definition revolves around taking many, many hard shots to go down. If we were designing a Hollywood-western RPG, for instance, that wouldn't be our chief heroic trait.

Which might be true, but I'm pretty sure I do know the reason that the designers choose to model heroism as being able to take many many hard shorts to go down anyway, and that is that they realized that any test based mechanic like, "Ordinary city-slickers might have a 1-in-20 chance of hitting, while he'd have a 19-in 20 chance of hitting.", would still leave the hero with a very very real chance of going down to any ordinary city-slicker. By leaving in the narrative/power of plot protection of a large number of hit points, any bad luck in the game could be translated into a minor 'flesh wound' in the story - leaving the hero on his feet to win the vast majority of such fights.

And it is precisely because this logic is so sound that the 'hit point' mechanic rather than some sort of pure 'test' mechanic remains the most common one in gaming, and in computer gaming in particular.

If you didn't know how D&D worked, but you knew that a 4th-level character was supposed to be a hero, you wouldn't immediately define him as able to take four times as many bullets, +20% accuracy, etc.

Yes, but I would press the argument that after extensive play testing, you would. Besides which, it's not unusual for the D&D hero to have a 19 in 20 chance of hitting the mook, while the mook has but a 1 in 20 chance of hitting the hero. This is part of how D&D defines heroic in addition to implementing hit points as a form of narrative control.

In fact, the defining trait of a hero, across many genres, is bravery. Bravery stands out to me as (a) lacking in D&D, for the most part, and (b) profoundly important in both real and fictional combat. In a gun-fight, the difference between the "high-level" and "low-level" characters is that the true gun-fighters can and will keep their nerve enough to hold their gun steady, to focus on the front sight, and to smoothly control the trigger, rather than jerk the trigger with the gun poking out from behind cover.

I fully agree, but note that 'bravery' stands out as a trait that is irrelevant to fictional heroic protagonists as well. Fictional heroic protagonists don't have to make 'bravery checks', and if we implemented 'bravery checks' they would fail for the same sort of reason as pure test mechanics fail - luck would overly define the narrative. Rather than having hero that is always brave, we'd have one with a 1 in 20 chance of fleeing from the mook. If you go back to D&D's roots, you can see this in the form of morale checks that monsters have to make, but which PC's are immune to. And again, there are other good reasons for not having 'bravery checks', because as much as possible we want to avoid taking control of the character away from the player.

In my DMing experience, I've found that bravery still remains very important to a D&D game even without a 'bravery check' mechanic, because very often the players themselves lose their nerve, or panic, or decide to throw down their shield and hope the monster eats the slower comrades first, and with often disasterous consequences.

 

[B.T.]

Which leaves us with a game where no class feels epic.

In my experience, an "epic" feel has less to do with stopping time for 1d4+1 rounds and more to do with what your character accomplishes.

 

[Celebrim]

In my experience, an "epic" feel has less to do with stopping time for 1d4+1 rounds and more to do with what your character accomplishes.

Be as that may, now you are just thread crapping. While in another setting I might be inclined to agree with you that some problems can be resolved by redefining epic in a way that doesn't refer to the size of numbers, I can't agree with you that that is the problem here. The OP has been quite clear and reasonable in defining his terms before using them, and does not appear to be someone who is overly attached to big numbers.

My own most recent campaign openned up with the 1st level characters fleeing from a massive city wrecking tsuanami, saving one of the rulers of a city state, and participating in a mass combat against an invading army of deep ones. That is 'epic' in the sense of 'what you accomplish' and in my opinion it is a lot more epic than treating a fight with Orcus as being fundamentally the same as a fight with a kobold just with bigger numbers, but how you dress and stage the adventure while an interesting topic doesn't really address the topic at hand. While it is true that you can change the world just by engaging in a conversation at 1st level with an NPC, that's not really something unique to a character class.

IMO, the OP is quite reasonable to notice that at high levels, at the very least, characters of different classes are no longer sharing equal spotlight and levels of control over their environment. And the mutual dependency that is the hallmark of the game at lower levels, tends to fall apart to some extent (especially in 3e) - something you've already recognized when you said, "Nerf wizards."

 

[Scott DeWar]

something discussed here turned up something over here at Piazo that looks promising.

 

[Meatboy]

Seems like I stired up some thoughts with this topic. But I will try to discuss some of the things that have been brought up and go from there.

I noticed a few times verisimilitude and believability were brought up as reasons why martial classes can't do cool stuff. I tend to agree with Celebrim about the level 5-6 cutoff where those things start to go out the window. The problem is that mundanes don't catch up after this point. They keep getting "better" because their numbers go up but they never really get in game abilities to do more.
I'll bring Batman and the JLA in now because even though he hs no super powers he does have plot power. Because he's written he always ends up being, doing, or having the right thing at the right time. I don't feel that this is a good thing for a game because it would be like the DM "letting" a player win only because they chose a fighter or a rogue not because they could beat the BBEG. I don't think the BBEG should fall over shouting "Swords! My one weakness..."

I think level plays a huge part in this. Invisibility was already tallked about and I am totaly ok with that being a thing but at the same time why does the rogue or ranger only get something equivilant 10 levels later. (at least in 3.x, sorry thats the system I'm most familiar with so will end up referencing it the most.)
Characters should get powers at roughly the same time sure caster will need to have or prepare said spell but the mundane should just be able to do it. Bye mid to late levels the "mundanes" should be miles ahead of what they should realistically be able to acomplish.

My Answer.
Probably the biggest thing holding back the mundane classes are the fictional archetypes that we get exposed to in books. In older editions 20th level mundanes were Conan, Aragorn, Gandalf, King Arthur and their fictional contemporaries. The problem here is the fact that reading the books and then seeing what is available for 20th level characters in DnD there is huge gap between what happens in the books and what PCs can do in game. Like Conan or Aragorn have trouble combating a dozen mooks in the books and rarely ever have to fight "monsters" ei things with DR or special powers. 6 or 7 level maybe. They are the centre peices of epic events but they don't do epic things, at least not in a DnD sense.
But thats just an example lets not make this about what level fictional characters are...

We need to look elsewhere for our epic heroes. Either at the past to figures like Hercules, Perseus and other figures of myth. Or east to Asia they seem to have no problems having warriors who can slice through arrows, bullets, walls, castles, armies, or pretty much do a whole slew of crazy awesome things.

I would really like to, as a character be able to singlehandedly assault a castle, use stones fired by catapaults as stepping stones to reach the top of the wall and in a single slice cleave all surrounding enemies (maybe cut the top off a tower and have it topple into the courtyard below for good measure.) Seeing that griffon rides circle overhead pick up a fallen bow and quiver, then load ALL the arrows into at once and shoot the eyes out of the beats and riders alike. To top it all off when the enemy wizard blasts a spell at me I'd like to be able to knock it back at him like my blade suddenly became some messed up kind of baseball bat.
When I can do something like that at level 20 I think the mundanes can then stand side beside with casters and know they have earned their spot and not just been some tag along.

 

[RangerWickett]

An epic fighter swings his sword and creates a slicing force that decapitates everyone in a blast radius. Then he catches the giant's greatclub in his hand, wrestles it to the ground, and punches through its ribcage to stop its heart. He is a little slowed down when the lich casts slay living on him, but he responds by stamping the ground, creating a rift that drops the lich into a pit and sends up a cloud of dust to block the undead's line of sight for spellcasting.

Then he takes his move action.

 

[S'mon]

In my 1e AD&D games, the high level Fighter types were definitely 'up there' with the casters. They'd be making saves on a '2' with their rings of protection et al, hitting on a '2' 4 times a round (eg Cavalier-16 Att 3/r, +1 with TWF) for enormous piles of damage with their girdles of storm giant strength and +3 swords of sharpness or +5 swords, flying through the air with cloaks of flying or whatever, soaking up damage that would kill demogorgon, and generally having a great time.

It was only a series of 3e design decisions that destroyed caster/non-caster balance. It's possible to strip out many of the ones that nerf non-casters, but some of the spells (and Druid companion animals) remain too good at replacing non-casters. By the time you've done everything necessary it's pretty much a new game, so I prefer to cap my 3e/PF games at E10 these days.