Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 7034872" data-source="post: 8550624">I openly confess I'm still new to DMing and very new to game design, so most of what follows could be naïveté (several of my other posts were...). Still, this has become such a heavily discussed and hotly debated subject that it's got my mind running through ideas when I should be asleep, so please indulge me.First, I want to publicly upvote something HammerMan said earlier: it's likely we'd all do better and feel better if we'd extend a little more mutual patience. The internet, I realize now, is a difficult medium for such efforts, but I still say it's worth the effort. No one ever got mad at me for trying harder to understand them (and I do think even the most adamant disputants on here are at least trying to understand the other side). I'm grateful for this thread and for all the posts in it: I've learned a lot more than I thought I needed to just from reading this and some related threads. And while sentiments do get riled, I don't think I've seen anyone here post in bad faith.Now, here's something from Mort that has me thinking again (or maybe it's just my elephant-strength coffee?):I think this is right, and while I still say folks like Oofta have a perfectly reasonable position, in the end I agree with those who say some meaningful changes ought to happen. Here's why: in all the campaigns my friends and I have had since I got back in the game in 2018, the great, great majority have played some sorts of casters and those that didn't generally went for Rogues and Monks. Fighters especially (but also Barbarians to an extent) just aren't showing up as player choices.Okay, but why not? Why aren't players choosing the pure martials much?On one hand, I think what Mort says is on the money: not much to do outside combat except stand around and look tough. But on another hand, I'm starting to wonder if another problem might be that so many other classes have too easy a time fighting and standing around and looking tough themselves. As an example of what I mean, when a buddy chose to play a Druid, his explicit justification was that they're full casters yet they can tank when needed, especially thanks to stuff like Shillelagh. And he was right. What would happen to the Bard in combat if there were no high-damage finesse weapons and if--now, this is an extreme thought experiment--AC had considerably more to do with heavier armor than with DEX? I think that Swiss army knife that everyone loves to hate would start to look a little flimsier, wouldn't it? (Let's set aside the crazy range of spells for my thought experiment.)Might part of the source of the problem derive not from Fighters and Barbarians lacking options outside combat, but from all the others having too many options inside combat? If the only classes that did well on their own in combat were these two, I suspect we'd see more players choose them. And that is the way we had it way back in AD&D days. Clerics and Druids could fight, but a club or a staff just didn't do the same work a good sword could. Wizards were squishier than throw-pillows, so they always stayed in the back and let people with muscle tissue handle the orcs. Sure, they'd cast some Magic Missiles and what-not, but only where they perceived it'd make a big difference, because casting was expensive and they had basically nothing by way of personal defense.Now, it seems clear that WotC ain't nevah goin' back to those days, but might there be some way for them to retune the system so that martials are flatly essential to combat and therefore to party survival? It wouldn't address any problems of the other two pillars, but it might still make Fighters more attractive to players, no? Or has this bird already decisively flown? Has WotC resolved never to take this path?</blockquote>

Verification