D&D General When Was it Decided Fighters Should Suck at Everything but Combat?

[JohnSnow]

Okay, so this may be a bit of a "hot take," but I've realized that part of the problem in fantasy RPGs in general, and D&D-adjacent games specifically, goes to what I think of as a somewhat silly trope: "Fighters" who are only good at, well, fighting.

When you go back to OD&D, there were just three classes: The Fighting Man, Magic-User, and Cleric. When the Thief got added, we suddenly have "Fighters" who get pigeon-holed into being the "meat shield" class. The inclusion of Rangers, Barbarians, and the like makes it worse. And 3e codifies the problem by giving Fighters just 2 skill points/level, while the renamed Rogue got 8(!). Now, an argument can be made that the rogue's thievery skills should be lumped into one just called "thievery," but I digress.

Here's my problem: does that fit with the tropes of fantasy fiction? Start naming iconic "fighting men" of fantasy, and you come up with characters like the Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan, Conan, Fafhrd, Gimli, Legolas, Boromir, Faramir, Madmartigan and arguably even including people like Robin Hood, Lan, and Aragorn. These "fighters" aren't just fighters. They have other abilities, being able to play the face of the party, use stealth, survive in the woods, and so forth. To pigeon-hole them as "the combat class" is to do a massive disservice to the fiction.

Classes may be good at representing archetypes, but "Fighters" need to be able to do more than just fight. Dirty tricks in combat, should, perhaps, be primarily the schtick of the Rogue class, but fighters need to have things they can do other than just be the brutes. I think Fantasy AGE might get this right, in that it only has three classes: the spellcasting "Mage," the trickster-focused skirmishing "Rogue," and the combat-focused "Warrior." And they all get skills.

What does everyone else think? Have fighters been shortchanged by being pigeon-holed as "the meat-shield class?"

 

[Reynard]

Okay, so this may be a bit of a "hot take," but I've realized that part of the problem in fantasy RPGs in general, and D&D-adjacent games specifically, goes to what I think of as a somewhat silly trope: "Fighters" who are only good at, well, fighting.

When you go back to OD&D, there were just three classes: The Fighting Man, Magic-User, and Cleric. When the Thief got added, we suddenly have "Fighters" who get pigeon-holed into being the "meat shield" class. The inclusion of Rangers, Barbarians, and the like makes it worse. And 3e codifies the problem by giving Fighters just 2 skill points/level, while the renamed Rogue got 8(!). Now, an argument can be made that the rogue's thievery skills should be lumped into one just called "thievery," but I digress.

Here's my problem: does that fit with the tropes of fantasy fiction? Start naming iconic "fighting men" of fantasy, and you come up with characters like the Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan, Conan, Fafhrd, Gimli, Legolas, Boromir, Faramir, Madmartigan and arguably even including people like Robin Hood, Lan, and Aragorn. These "fighters" aren't just fighters. They have other abilities, being able to play the face of the party, use stealth, survive in the woods, and so forth. To pigeon-hole them as "the combat class" is to do a massive disservice to the fiction.

Classes may be good at representing archetypes, but "Fighters" need to be able to do more than just fight. Dirty tricks in combat, should, perhaps, be primarily the schtick of the Rogue class, but fighters need to have things they can do other than just be the brutes. I think Fantasy AGE might get this right, in that it only has three classes: the spellcasting "Mage," the trickster-focused skirmishing "Rogue," and the combat-focused "Warrior." And they all get skills.

What does everyone else think? Have fighters been shortchanged by being pigeon-holed as "the meat-shield class?"

The problem was the inclusion of skills at all.

 

[Tigris]

I think the problem is more that "fighter" is a general name, but the class is more specific.


From the people you named for me only Gimli is a fighter (and maybe boromir and faramir but I would just call them minions/NPC/Useless).

Argagorn was literally what the Ranger was modeled after and Conan what the Barbarian is modeled after.


Fighter is a strength based high armored frontlaner (or is normally), so its not just everyone who fights. And the problem why they are so bad outside combat is often that Strength (and even worse constitution) are not useful outside combat at least not that often.


I would say in 5.24 the Fighter is as good in non combat as it was since at least 3E. Sure Strength based still has the problem of Strength just sucking, but you can easily go Dex based, and you have many subclasses which add more non combat features AND you have the really good tactical mind ability.


Even 4E, which made everyone useful in combat, forgot to made also everyone useful outside combat, so Kudos to 5.24.


I think one problem is a bit that fighter lacks a bit flavour (so its not clear what they should be good at outside combat), and that originally the Rogue was the martial which was good outside combat. And with Martial design often so narrow in D&D (they just basic attack...) it was hard to make the martials feel different while also making both of them in and outside combat equally good.

 

[JohnSnow]

The problem was the inclusion of skills at all.

Agree to disagree.

The game needed a way to resolve characters being good at things other than combat, and basing it entirely on attributes is overly simplistic.

If a DM had a way to handle that, what they had done was homebrew a “skill system.”

 

[JohnSnow]

I think the problem is more that "fighter" is a general name, but the class is more specific.


From the people you named for me only Gimli is a fighter (and maybe boromir and faramir but I would just call them minions/NPC/Useless).

Boromir is clearly a fighter. It could be argued he’s an NPC, but he’s still a fighter. Jackson films notwithstanding, the heaviest armor in Middle-Earth is mail. And nobody in the Fellowship but Gimli (and Frodo) wears any until they get to Helm’s Deep. Boromir carries a shield.

Argagorn was literally what the Ranger was modeled after and Conan what the Barbarian is modeled after.

The fighter class sucking is why 1e gave us the Barbarian. The 3e berzerker is not based on Conan, who never, to my recollection, exhibited any form of “combat frenzy.” To say he’s a Barbarian based merely on the book title is specious, to say the least.

Fighter is a strength based high armored frontlaner (or is normally), so its not just everyone who fights. And the problem why they are so bad outside combat is often that Strength (and even worse constitution) are not useful outside combat at least not that often.

Please give examples of this hero archetype from (non-D&D) fiction. I’ll wait.

 

[James Gasik]

Even 4E, which made everyone useful in combat, forgot to made also everyone useful outside combat, so Kudos to 5.24.

Just wanted to expand on this point. The issue wasn't that 4e didn't have outside combat resources- it totally did (Rituals, Martial Practices, Feats, Utility Powers). The problem came that, when you had a decision point for say, a new Feat or Utility Power that added out of combat utility (say, the Animal Empathy Feat, which granted +2 to Nature checks, and allowed you to use Nature as Insight when dealing with Beasts or Arcane Porter, which allowed your Familiar to carry a 5 lb. object), most players realized that they didn't know when/if such things would be useful. But they absolutely knew that Backstabber that turned d6's of Sneak Attack into d8's or Battlewise, allowing you to use Wisdom to determine initiative, would come up, because combat was inevitable, and the failure state of combat was perceived to be much worse than the failure state of a non-combat test or Skill Challenge (not always true, you could die in a Skill Challenge, but I only saw that one time during Scales of War).

It was because 4e presented it as a choice between "choose combat bonus" vs. "choose non-combat bonus" that was the real problem. You can still see this in 5e, where I've rarely seen anyone take the flavorful non-combat Feats (beyond things that boost Perception/Investigation like Observant) over new combat options (something exacerbated by the fact that you get fewer Feats which compete with ability score improvements). The difference is mostly that classes come packaged with combat and non-combat abilities, and spells are a mix of combat and utility effects.

 

[Reynard]

Agree to disagree.

The game needed a way to resolve characters being good at things other than combat, and basing it entirely on attributes is overly simplistic.

If a DM had a way to handle that, what they had done was homebrew a “skill system.”

You are asking about the early game and what went wrong. Adding skills was exactly that. That is a different argument than "skills are a bad thing" generally in D&D, but for the game that D&D was when it was created, skills undermined one of the core tenets of play: the players' skill mattered most.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I think virtually all of D&D is pigeonholed as only doing combat. Fighters just get the worst of it. They don't get spells (one of the major mechanisms into which mechanical support for non-combat play is lumped). They are always at or near the bottom in terms of getting skill access, with skills being the core of noncombat play these days. The main other way the game supports non-combat play is with the occasional class ability, but the name "Fighter" suggests that suitably flavorful abilities for the class should relate to fighting.

In my own attempt at a 5e clone several years back I replaced fighters with Warriors, Sellswords, and Hunters, and the latter two at least lent themself more to having some non-combat abilities.

But part of the reason that project fizzled out is that it was still very much a 5e D&D game I was designing, and after stepping away from 5e for a couple years and having to attempt to slightly relearn everything for 2024 5e I just realized that the whole system has become too bogged down with combat abilities. Most of my favorite D&D memories are non-combat experiences, yet 90% of the rules are combat, most of the mental load of planning or running a game relates to having balanced combats and combat stats familiar and at the ready, and then the actual combats are often on the sloggy side. Now I'm not saying combat shouldn't get a lot of rules support or that it shouldn't be the biggest pillar of play, but at this point it has just gobbled up the whole game entirely.

 

[Tigris]

Please give examples of this hero archetype from (non-D&D) fiction. I’ll wait.

Any knight in any medieval movie or book etc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem was the inclusion of skills at all.

Eh. Wasn't like the lack of something skill-like hadn't caused any number of problems over the years. It getting mostly walled-off into the thief/rogue class early did nothing any favors though, and it colored all the decisions later.