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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6825958" data-attributes="member: 996">Couldn't tell you which book.  I vaguely remember it being there and people have brought it up a lot whenever the usefulness of inherent bonuses in 4e was mentioned.  That's kinda the point.  This is a discussion of a non-core addition to the game.  Sure, informal roles have been with the game throughout it's history, and still exist in 5e.   But a great deal has been made of 5e not formally having roles so I didn't feel like swimming against that current.  Yes, in 3.5 a low/no magic game in the sense of few/no PC casters would have a tough time for want of many party-contributions that edition made caster-exclusive.  5e currently suffers from the same problem, writ a bit larger, since it has an even higher proportion of caster PC options.No kludging or experience required.  A Martial Controller would certainly have improved things - I agitated for one on the WotC boards - but all-martial parties worked fine, even in standard-issue settings & adventures.  It wasn't just martial, either, the DM could very easily change up a setting by removing certain Sources.  Low/no magic could be martial only.  You could have a godless setting be removing divine. Etc.   5e doesn't draw Source lines in the first place, so whether a Druid is 'primal' or 'divine' is debatable, for instance, and  that complicates such customizations.  Still, some of 'em are workable.  More could be, and all-martial or no/low magic is a prime candidate.Magic items were pretty low-impact so not a major issue.  And the first three levels of ranger.  Later, the Knight & Scout.  And, while it didn't have sub-classes, it had a lot of diversity in builds, especially those using fighter as a component.The Barbarian and Rogue were locked in, though the Rogue's DPR was not at all dependable.  The fighter had alternatives thanks to it's customizable design.  You could - especially with later supplements and optimized builds - have a fighter with dependable DPR competitive with Barbarians and CoDzilla.  You could also create battlefield control builds that could have passed for Controllers had there been a way to port them.  But, meaningful support contributions were out of reach without magic.(EX) was explicitly not magical.  Worked fine an anti-magic fields, for instance.  It does DEX vs STR very smoothly, something no prior ed has handled so well.  Aside from that, no.  It's a beatstick.  It has a more varied choice of sticks than the 2e fighter, but not such great saves at high level.  A 5e fighter's most meaningful contribution to his party will always be DPR.  You can willfully under-perform at that function, but you can't swap it out for something equally good.  The fighter's a dead end as far as that goes.  Additional alternatives to caster classes are needed.No, I'm saying it should be expanded to cover several related play styles that have been with the game since its inception (all the way back to Chainmail, for that matter), and that the game did finally do quite smoothly with 4e, less smoothly in 3.5, and not so well at all in the classic versions.  5e isn't there yet, but the Warlord would be a significant step in that direction.  As far as that goes, yes, it's fine for low/no magic /item/ campaigns. Such campaigns only heighten the relative importance of PC casters, though.  There are no non-magical 5e classes, as yet.  There's 5 such sub-classes:  3 tanky DPR, two skill-monkey DPR.  No viable/meaningful alternatives.  That's not variety.</blockquote>

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