Why do all classes have to be balanced?

[ForeverSlayer]

Why are the fighters commanding armies? How are they? If it's 3.X, I see no abilities that even slightly help fighters command armies. A bard would make a better general than a fighter. And that's the problem in 3.X/PF. The fighters get no epicness. It all goes to the casters.

I guess you forgot about the Leadership feat.

 

[Hussar]

I guess you forgot about the Leadership feat.

How is that a fighter feat? Anyone can take leadership and get the exact same benefit. Actually, a cleric makes a much better choice anyway since he actually gets some benefit from the high Cha. The fighter? None of his class skills benefit from Cha (IIRC) and none of his class skills do. It's generally a dump stat. Taking Leadership is a fairly poor choice for a fighter.

And, leadership does not allow you to lead armies. At best, you get a 150 1st to 6th level followers and a cohort (and that's the max you will ever get). So, how exactly does Leadership help me command armies?

Talk about 15th level is odd considering thats just when most campaigns usually peter out anyways. I think D&D should get a lil wacky in the last few levels anyways. The fighters are commanding armys and the wizards are jumping planes, it seems like some people are just complaining that all the epicness isnt exactly the same from character to character. Last time I looked at a poll (source?) almost no one played level 15 and up anyways.

Campaigns peter out here because play here is virtually impossible. You spend a year getting to this point and now your muggle classes are "carrying the wizard's jockstrap". That's not a bug, that's a deliberate feature of the whole "zero to fantastic cosmic power" concept behind casters. If the wizard is wielding fantastic cosmic power, then the fighter is the BMX Bandit.

Simply brushing away the problem by saying, "well, it's not a problem, no one ever does that anyway" doesn't resolve the underlying issues. There's a reason E6 works like it does - it's to counter the caster issues of D&D. There's a reason the "sweet spot" ends at 12th level.

And that reason is the D&D magic system.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

How is that a fighter feat? Anyone can take leadership and get the exact same benefit.

Oh right I forgot, classes have to have something that only they can take for it to be acknowledged . You said a fighter couldn't have an army and I proved you wrong, also there is no size requirement for an army. 163 is the max amount of troops you could get.

 

[Arlough]

How is that a fighter feat? Anyone can take leadership and get the exact same benefit. Actually, a cleric makes a much better choice anyway since he actually gets some benefit from the high Cha. The fighter? None of his class skills benefit from Cha (IIRC) and none of his class skills do. It's generally a dump stat. Taking Leadership is a fairly poor choice for a fighter.

And, leadership does not allow you to lead armies. At best, you get a 150 1st to 6th level followers and a cohort (and that's the max you will ever get). So, how exactly does Leadership help me command armies?

That can be enough of an army. My 12th level sorcerer was able to get 48 followers to follow him. He used them to pull a Macross Missile Massacre with lvl 5 Wands of Magic Missile to do murder the BBEG as he stood before the city gates demanding our surrender. Did about 540 or so damage (144d4 + 144 damage, thank god for die rolling software) outright, followed by attacks every round thereafter. He died in about 5 rounds, as there was no total cover out there. Then the rest of his army kinda disintegrated under the fire.

 

[Hussar]

Oh right I forgot, classes have to have something that only they can take for it to be acknowledged . You said a fighter couldn't have an army and I proved you wrong, also there is no size requirement for an army. 163 is the max amount of troops you could get.

What kind of army has 163 troops? That's an oversized company. And, that required your fighter to be about 15th or so, level.

But, again, how does this actually help him lead an army?

Arlough - thank you for proving my point. Even your army can't be fighters to be effective, they have to all be wizards.

 

[pemerton]

Oh right I forgot, classes have to have something that only they can take for it to be acknowledged

The topic of discussion was whether a 15th level fighter PC adds anything significant to a 15th level group of PCs, relative to the other optiosn available to a player at that level.

In this context, it was said that:

Talk about 15th level is odd considering thats just when most campaigns usually peter out anyways. I think D&D should get a lil wacky in the last few levels anyways. The fighters are commanding armys and the wizards are jumping planes

Now this is true in AD&D and B/X. But in 3E there is no special mechanic that makes fighters be able to command armies. (Whereas there is a special mechanic that permits clerics and wizards to jump planes - the Plane Shift spell.)

You said a fighter couldn't have an army and I proved you wrong

The point is that the wizard or cleric could also have that army. And to the extent that CHA is a factor, a sorcerer or cleric would probably do a better job of it than a fighter.

Hence, talking about armies is not identifying anything distinctive that the fighter brings to the table.

 

[Bluenose]

I'm not meaning to imply that don't.

What I'm trying to say is that in a game with E6/Runequest-style play - skills are more important than spells, travel is by foot or horseback rather than teleport even for powerful PCs, etc - we are not talking about a D&D-ish game at all. We are not talking about a game in which the playes, by using their PCs' magical abilities (teleport, rope trick, healing etc), can exercise a very high degree of control over scene-framing, the passage of time, the mitigation of consequences from past encounters, etc. And, therefore (in my view) are not really answering the question posed by Hussar, which was (I think) fairly obviously talking about a 15th level D&D-style party.

You could add The One Ring to that list of examples. Travel, even when it goes well, causes fatigue. Fatigue is a significant factor in fights. The whole "feel" in games lake TOR, RQ can be of a struggle to survive, which with D&D spellcasters around stops being the case in situations other than combat past 6th-8th level.

What kind of army has 163 troops? That's an oversized company. And, that required your fighter to be about 15th or so, level.

That actually depends rather on the type of campaign you're playing in. I can find an Anglo-Saxon law code where an army is defined as fifty men or more. In my home campaign, 163 warriors is a significant force in most areas. Even the larger kingdoms struggle to put armies of more than the low thousands into the field, and that tends to bankrupt them.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I guess you forgot about the Leadership feat.

The feat that everyone should take if it's legal - but is so overpowered it normally isn't? And that all but ensures that the fighter has one of the smallest groups of followers going as the fighter wants decent stats in St, Dex, and Con, probably an Int of 13 for Expertise, and some Wis for will? That feat?

Right. So even what they are supposedly good at when they supposedly turn epic, fighters are worse at than most other classes? Gotcha.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

But, why do all classes in a RPG be able to do everything as well as all the others?

That's not at all what balance advocates want. Even if it were, no edition has ever done this and I don't see why 5e would be the first.

 

[hanez]

That's not at all what balance advocates want. Even if it were, no edition has ever done this and I don't see why 5e would be the first.

Is it not true that "balance advocates"want to be able to do the 3 pillars equally well? Is it not true that they want a fixed effectiveness, inside each pillar (e.g. 50% effective at combat, 25% effective at exploration, and 25% effective at social) and for this "ratio" of effectiveness to be equal for every class?

While the quote "why do all classes in a RPG be able to do everything as well as all the others?" may be in simple terms, I would argue that if effectiveness within each of the main aspects of the game (3 pillars) is set like I have heard some advocate, then all classes are doing "everything as well as all the others"

Sure maybe 1 class can push 2 squares and cause condition x, while another class can pull 2 squares and cause condition y, and maybe one has 5 of these skills, and the other has 5 of those skills, but they are much closer to being identical, we will hear complaints that classes are identical and the problem will be rightly simplified that its due to classes being able to do "everything as well as all the others".