D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[AlViking]

I have a question for people who argue against complexity for a Fighter class.

Here are two most common complaints I have seen from people who play martial characters in D&D. Not just Fighters but also Monks, Barbarians, Rogues and other nonmagical classes.

1. "On my turn all I do is the same boring swinging weapons"
2. "At higher levels casters can bend reality and slaughter whole armies, bring dragons to their knees, command forces of nature and imprison gods...while I still jsut swing my boring weapon like I do on lower levels, except number went up"

Those are complaints that adding more complexity like maneuvers is supposed to solve or at least mitigate. How do you solve them without increasing class complexity?

And btw, no, giving them followers and land does not count, I noticed overlap of people who make this complaint and those who despise all stuff that comes in owning land and having followers in say, BECMI, on the ground it a) interrupts the game loop with mechanics completely unrelated to what the class was doing and b) always forces the PC to obey their liege or get invaded, as no edition of D&D ever had such mechancis and did not punish anyone trying to be "Conan at the court".

If you believe #1 there are likely multiple classes and builds you wouldn't want to play. Fortunately there are subclasses or other classes that have more options. Personally it's not an issue for me, when playing a fighter I focus on other things and there are always options for shoving, knocking prone, grapple, any number of things.

For #2? I've tracked damage and fighter typically comes out on top. Meanwhile if your party is teleporting halfway across the world that's because the DM knows you can teleport and set the objective you're trying to achieve halfway across the world instead of down the street.

Fighting styles, feats and with 2024 weapon mastery all add other options. It just depends on what the person wants to play.

 

[Maxperson]

In my system, on first thought I'd probably do it something like:

--- what would normally be your daily slots per level become the number of daily random spells per level, thus if your slots would normally be 4 1st, 2 2nd and 1 3rd you'd instead draw four random 1st-level spells, two random 2nd-level spells, and 1 random 3rd-level spell each morning
--- the spells you draw each morning are the only spells you can hard-cast that day and no effect in the game can change this
--- you are unlimited in how often you can cast those spells during the day you have them, other than limits imposed by availability of significant material components (e.g. if you draw Identify today you're only limited by how many 100 gp pearls you can access)
--- non-significant material components are ignored; you don't need to keep trivial components on hand for every spell in the game just in case you draw it today
--- spells that are not on today's castable list can be cast from scrolls but at a high to very high chance of failure and-or wild magic surge
--- regardless of your actual rest cycle the "day" resets at sunrise (or equivalent, if off-plane) at which point spells must be redrawn
--- a few game-breaking spells such as Wish, Alter Reality, and similar cannot be drawn this way (in other words, those spells don't have cards in the deck you draw from) and can only be accessed through scrolls, use of which does not suffer the same high risk of failure unless the spell is above the level you can normally cast.

I think unlimited casting would break the ability. What I was thinking was more an extra +1 to the DC of the spells and they would cast at 1 spell slot higher than the one used. Or perhaps 50% more spell slots, round up.

The components would also have to be waived, even the costly ones since being randomly served up a spell with such a component would suck and likely be unusable. You wouldn't want to spend gold on the component "just in case" since it may never show up again.

Lastly, I'd let Wish be there, since you can just pick it as a spell and always have it as a high level Wizard or Sorcerer. The randomness of the deck draws means that it will probably show up only rarely, if at all.

 

[Distracted DM]

While logical, one could say and players would also argue that tooth/fang and claws and other such weaponized body parts should be breaking sometimes as well.

Ya know, there were certain JRPGs where you had a limited amount of "Fist" attack...

 

[Distracted DM]

Let's look at this from the other side of the game.

Imagine if as a spellcaster, you get to pick your cantrips, but every leveled spell you get is randomly determined per day. Not in the old "magic user randomly generated their spellbook" style, but more a "here is a deck with all the first level spells in the game. Draw four. Those are the spells you have until you finish a long rest." Maybe you get grease, burning hands, cure wounds and shield today and tomorrow you are stuck with detect magic, longstrider, animal friendship, and heroism. Make it work.

1. Would you want to build a caster who you have little or no control what your abilities are day to day? You might get useful spells or you might get useless ones?

13th Age has the Chaos Mage, which is very much this. I loved it, I liked being handed random tools and having to made do with them what I could.. BUT that's not for everyone.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

As far as I'm concerned, those complaints fall on deaf ears. They are all from those folks who like complexity and have eleven other classes to pick from. If someone chooses the one simple class to play and then complains about it not being complex enough, that's on them. It would be like choosing to wear a T-shirt and shorts into a snowstorm and then complaining about being too cold.

If you want to play a more complex fighting type class that swings a weapon, pick Barbarian, Ranger or Paladin. Or heck, make a Bladesinger. And if it has to be a Fighter, pick Battle Master, Eldritch Knight or another subclass that adds complexity.

I will repeat, these complaints are applied to ALL martial classes, not just the Fighter. Barbarian, Monk, Rogue and sometimes even Paladin and Ranger are all facing this criticism. Claiming people have 11 other classes is just not true in this context.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I have a question for people who argue against complexity for a Fighter class.

Here are two most common complaints I have seen from people who play martial characters in D&D. Not just Fighters but also Monks, Barbarians, Rogues and other nonmagical classes.

1. "On my turn all I do is the same boring swinging weapons"
2. "At higher levels casters can bend reality and slaughter whole armies, bring dragons to their knees, command forces of nature and imprison gods...while I still jsut swing my boring weapon like I do on lower levels, except number went up"

Those are complaints that adding more complexity like maneuvers is supposed to solve or at least mitigate. How do you solve them without increasing class complexity?

And btw, no, giving them followers and land does not count, I noticed overlap of people who make this complaint and those who despise all stuff that comes in owning land and having followers in say, BECMI, on the ground it a) interrupts the game loop with mechanics completely unrelated to what the class was doing and b) always forces the PC to obey their liege or get invaded, as no edition of D&D ever had such mechancis and did not punish anyone trying to be "Conan at the court".

This topic is always fun. I'm sure this will go over wonderfully.

Why must we always frame it as "complexity = good?" Game design isn't so shallow. The community D&D is designed for isn't so shallow. Few things in this world are that shallow. Fighter simplicity is intentional design. It's not a flaw to be “fixed.”

Once we accept that the simplicity is intentional, our options are limited. How can we placate the subset of the community hellbent on tactical depth at every turn, while weighing the desires of the subset that wishes for simplicity, and for the new players that often desire or need that same simplicity?

We have but a few options. None will make everyone happy. We can bolt on subsystems (like weapon masteries), we can completely reframe what fighter turns look like (like 4e), or we can accept that some players will find fighters boring. On these very forums, we have seen time and time again, that the subsystem WotC tried is polarizing. On these very forums, we have seen time and time again, that reimagining fighter turns, like 4e, is polarizing. Even on forums full of the most enfranchised of the enfranchised, these options are polarizing.

And the real issue is; there’s no evidence the broader community actually wants a more complex fighters. It makes sense that Enworld is more in favor of such changes, as we are more enfranchised. In other games, such as Magic the Gathering, designers reference this all the time. Enfranchised players want more complexity than is healthy for the game. A simple trip to Mark Rosewater's blog makes this evident, as he beats this drum relentlessly.

And so, there’s real risk that if we push complexity too hard, we burn away the simple classes and raise the barrier of entry for new players. We do exactly what terrifies MTG designers, while pretending it's all upside here. We choke off the very thing that makes the game sustainable, it's new players at the source.

So the argument is simple. You need simple classes. You need simplicity. If you don't you cause harm to the game. So chasing a more complex fighter is a fool's errand and WotC is correct to do so very carefully, if at all.

 

[GrimCo]

Those are complaints that adding more complexity like maneuvers is supposed to solve or at least mitigate. How do you solve them without increasing class complexity?

Simplicity comes from that basic loop - hit them with the pointy end. Wizards complexity comes from choices. But those choices gives them options to do cool stuff at high levels. If you want fighters to do cool stuff, well, you need to make it bit more complex. But, you can play complex character in simple way. FE Warblade in 3.5 got stances and manouvers. So you had options to break laws of physics and do really cool stuff. But also, you could play Warblade as basic fighter- just bonk stuff over head until they dropped.

3.5 solved it with magic items. You got elemental damage, resistance to magic, crits, larger crit ranges, auto decapitation on crits etc. That's one way. Other is similar. You give them always on passive abilities. For instance, Champions improved critical. You get it, scribe it next to your weapon on character sheet and that's it.

 

[Lanefan]

I think unlimited casting would break the ability.

I don't, and the unlimited casting piece is the benefit to counteract all the rather obvious drawbacks this comes with. Further, were it a 5e environment I'd also relax or even eliminate concentration mechanics for this class other than for maintaining complex illusions.

What it means is that one day you might be the most useful caster ever and the next day you're doing next to nothing, simply based on the spells you happened to pull. If your two 2nd-level spells today happen to be Invisibility and Levitate then sure, you can make the whole party invisible and get them all floating in the air but you're not going to do a shred of combat damage to anyone. Tomorrow your spells at 2nd might be Magic Mouth and Stinking Cloud - useful sometimes but not always. And so on.

What I was thinking was more an extra +1 to the DC of the spells and they would cast at 1 spell slot higher than the one used. Or perhaps 50% more spell slots, round up.

Not nearly enough benefit for the drawbacks, IMO.

The components would also have to be waived, even the costly ones since being randomly served up a spell with such a component would suck and likely be unusable. You wouldn't want to spend gold on the component "just in case" since it may never show up again.

Most of the high-cost component spells aren't in-field spells anyway. Identify is IME by far the most common exception.

Which brings up another point: there's some spells that are more intended to be cast during downtime rather than in the field, e.g. Enchant Item, and those probably shouldn't be in the card decks either. Ditto things that (in 1e) take hours to cast anyway e.g. Find Familiar.

Lastly, I'd let Wish be there, since you can just pick it as a spell and always have it as a high level Wizard or Sorcerer. The randomness of the deck draws means that it will probably show up only rarely, if at all.

Someone having unlimited access to Wish for a day could, to say the least, become problematic in a hurry.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

3.5 solved it with magic items. You got elemental damage, resistance to magic, crits, larger crit ranges, auto decapitation on crits etc. That's one way.

That also creates its own issue, namely that in 3.5 it was very common to complain that 1. Meele characters are so useless their magic weapons and items do everything for them (which lead to 5e removing ability to buy magic items) and 2. Nothing stops casters from picking up the same magic items and overshadow martials even more. you know, it's like in Marvel when they were creating Wolverine. Originally he was supposed to wear gauntlets that have retractable claws, until an artist or editor pointed out that anyone can just put them on and be Wolverine, which lead to the claws as we know them, being part of his adamantium skeleton.

Why must we always frame it as "complexity = good?"

Except the complaints I listed are things people are actively saying about martial classes, not assumptions. People come to this game to be cool heroes and are pissed that the only way to do that is to be a caster, when most of heroes in fantasy are able to be cool and heroic and do amazing things without being magic users. They want that and then come to play a Fighter or Rogue and are frustrated they do the same thing each turn, have no strategy to use aside "swing weapon" and do not feel like growing in power at all, while casters do.

If you can find a way to solve these issues without increasing complexity, then I'd be interested.

Also, I like to look at Draw Steel, which is already very succesful and effectively has no real "simple" class and Matt Colville even spoke how, even if you play a meele class, this is not a game where you play a regular dude with sword & board, you play the likes of Hercules, Samson or Cu Chulain and the mechanics are reflecting that. And it seems to be working pretty well.