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

[Micah Sweet]

'Make an INT check' was surely a more common thing than in the post 3e world, and being a d20 roll under meant that having a few points more than someone else made a genuine difference to the odds.

We used roll under all the time in our mostly 1e games.

 

[soviet]

We used roll under all the time in our mostly 1e games.

I started with 2e and we used NWPs, but even then 'roll under X stat' was a common occurence (and it's essentially what NWPs are anyway)

 

[Bill Zebub]

Or you could increase the difficulty of a maneuver if you try to use it multiple times in the same situation, to represent one's opponents getting wise to your style.

If "difficulty" also means "risk" then I'm all for it. That could mean just the difficulty, if you have to give up your action to use it. (Increased chance of wasted turn.). But if it's, say, something you just add on to your regular attack, then increasing the difficulty isn't really much of a trade-off.

In general I think a red flag signaling potentially poor design is if players say, "Sure, why not try? Can't hurt?" (For example, "Can I roll, too?")

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'll again suggest that barring spells and class abilities, D&D has never much been good at this. Its probably better now than in the OD&D days, but that's damning with faint praise.

Right, it's damning with faint praise. So I don't think it's a worthwhile objective to try to make skills be as exciting as combat was in OD&D.

And it really doesn't take much to make it feel like your choices matter in combat. Some basic movement and position, cover, a couple different choices other than "I swing my sword" and it can be pretty fun. (One of the many reasons I tired of The One Ring is that combat was just too repetitive.)

I'm not sold they have to be situational, and they absolutely don't have to be improvised. You could provide a list of optional things you can do that cause other penalties, and most of them would be generic within a given skill.

You keep saying it can be done ("it" being to design a general purpose skill system that is like a halfway decent combat system, where player choices matter). So...where is it? Who has done it?

 

[Bill Zebub]

And, for the record, I disagree with the premise in the title of the thread. I don't think Fighters suck at all. I love playing Fighters (and Rogues) because all that movement and positioning stuff is their bread & butter. Wizards may math out well, but I both hate the game of conserving my spell slots (as mentioned up thread) and I also find it boring to stand in the back casting cantrips. Cantrips are the Wizard equivalent of "I swing my sword...again."

EDIT: And of course I had forgotten what the title actually said: "...at everything but combat." I'm so used to people complaining that Fighters aren't fun to play in general I forgot that part.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If "difficulty" also means "risk" then I'm all for it. That could mean just the difficulty, if you have to give up your action to use it. (Increased chance of wasted turn.). But if it's, say, something you just add on to your regular attack, then increasing the difficulty isn't really much of a trade-off.

In general I think a red flag signaling potentially poor design is if players say, "Sure, why not try? Can't hurt?" (For example, "Can I roll, too?")

I would have it take your action.

 

[Lanefan]

The problem with that is getting a group of more than five players (including the GM) together to play on the regular. Five is hard enough. Six or seven is mythical.

Divorce your thinking from "strictly one character per player" and you'll soon get here.

My current group is four players but these days they fairly consistently run a party of 8 or 9 characters including adventuring NPCs, henches, and second characters.

Recruiting adventuring NPCs also fills in any gaps in the lineups while still allowing players to play the classes etc. they want to play.

I'm OK with the fighter being a defender, but in the best of worlds there should be another class that looks like a fighter but is more striker-y. But the 4e PHB already had two other martial strikers (ranger and rogue), so I can't really fault them there.

I never liked Rogue as a chief damage-dealer. 4e really wanted to make everyone equally-ish effective in combat but IMO overdid it. Rogues should be essential as scouts, sneaks, and trapfinders but take a bit more of a back seat in combat, which is the Fighters' realm.

Rangers have been borked ever since 2e.

As for other areas of competency, the goal would be to have enough areas that overlap would, in most cases, be minimal. Just spit-balling here, but something like a total of 15 competencies with each character having like 5? That'd be 20 in a 4-person party which would mean that if you spread things out you have an overlap on 5 of them, which seems fine to me.

One thing I try to avoid is the idea of "if you don't have a skill you can't even try something". Anyoen can try picking a lock even though their odds of succeeding might be very poor; anyone can try tracking something through the wilderness and who knows, might even pull it off, and so on.

Having the skill or ability, though, makes you markedly better at whatever it is.

 

[Lanefan]

If "difficulty" also means "risk" then I'm all for it. That could mean just the difficulty, if you have to give up your action to use it. (Increased chance of wasted turn.). But if it's, say, something you just add on to your regular attack, then increasing the difficulty isn't really much of a trade-off.

In general I think a red flag signaling potentially poor design is if players say, "Sure, why not try? Can't hurt?" (For example, "Can I roll, too?")

How is that poor design?

If, say, the roll is to see if someone knows something obscure then sure, the character with the Knowledge skill in that area gets by far the best odds. But everyone else should still be able to roll if they want to, though, even if only on a "If you roll a 20 I'll think about it" basis, because who knows what obscure bits of info a specific character might have tucked away.

 

[soviet]

How is that poor design?

If, say, the roll is to see if someone knows something obscure then sure, the character with the Knowledge skill in that area gets by far the best odds. But everyone else should still be able to roll if they want to, though, even if only on a "If you roll a 20 I'll think about it" basis, because who knows what obscure bits of info a specific character might have tucked away.

I think 'roll to see if you know something' is itself poor design.

'Everyone has at least a 5% chance to know anything' is also bad design. Every player rolling just in hope of getting a 20 (but probably nothing happens) is bad design. Players not knowing what their characters have knowledge of is bad design. The barbarian randomly knowing a point about the history of magic that neither the wizard or the bard knew is bad design.

 

[Bill Zebub]

How is that poor design?

If, say, the roll is to see if someone knows something obscure then sure, the character with the Knowledge skill in that area gets by far the best odds. But everyone else should still be able to roll if they want to, though, even if only on a "If you roll a 20 I'll think about it" basis, because who knows what obscure bits of info a specific character might have tucked away.

Yeah, exactly this. Terrible game design. If there's no risk, there shouldn't be a roll.