Why Shouldn't Martial Characters have powers?

[yipwyg42]

The thing that I've always thought about D&D was it was its own type of fantasy. Basically D&D has with its core 3 books set what defaults about the game is like.

For example in 3.5 characters are assumed to have a set amount of magic items to keep them on par with the challenge ratings of monsters. Yes you can manipulate this, however you have to adjust the challenge ratings of the monsters so they don't overrun the characters.

Alot of what I have read on d20 sites say they want to run low magic, Conan, etc... type campaigns. Yes you can do this with D&D , however I think it is better to use a system that is tailored for it.

Conan for example has a modified d20 system that mimics the sword and sorcery tropes. Casters are dangerous but they are nowhere near on par with 20th level wizards in a typical D&D game.

I guess what I am saying if I really wanted to, I could run a World of Darkness type game, where players play vampires, werewolves, etc... with the standard 3.5 system. I think though it would be better handled with Monte Cooks world of darkness d20 though.

I plan on switching to 4th edition as soon as it comes out. What I have read so far, I really like. They are changing with the times. I finally see D&D taking things from modern fantasy novels. This might not make everyone happy, but they need to keep up with the times, if they want to stay number one.

 

[Mercule]

The only problem I have with this is that the Spartans in "300," awesome and over-the-top as they seem to our mundane eyes, are really on MID-level fighters. In 4e terms, I think they'll be excellent examples of what fighters can be the 'paragon' levels - levels 10-20. Most cinematic fantasy heroes are in this same range, including the movie versions of Aragorn and Legolas and Conan and Achilles. I can maybe see Beowulf at the extreme upper end of this range.

But an epic fighter (or a high-teens fighter in 3e) is beyond that level. He's not really a "fantasy novel" character any more, he's a "mythic" character. He's on par with the Achilles of the original epic: LITERALLY (and magically) invulnerable except for his one weak point. Or Heracles, who briefly takes the load of THE ENTIRE WORLD off a titan's shoulders. As awesome as Leonidas is, he's not going to be hoisting planets, and he can still be killed by someone who bypasses or overwhelms his skill.

Eventually, you hit that point where fighters, like all other PCs, are mythic characters or superheroes. They pass through Gritty, Pulp and Action Movie and hit a level where what they're doing is not even remotely related to what actual humans do. HOW they go about doing their demigodly deeds matters less than the fact they're doing them.

I think you've just nailed why I've never cared for uber-level D&D games.

I don't have a problem with the idea of playing Hercules. I just have a problem with the notion that he could have started at ECL 1.

Achilles... Well, I could buy into the feel of having someone quest for that invulnerability around level 20. I'm not saying magic doesn't have it's place -- if the sword flames, that's cool; if the fighter makes a semi-random weapon flame, that's wizard territory. The rest of what Achilles did was still "mundane", by which I mean rather improbable but an exaggeration of mundane fighting techniques.

....

I think my best-case scenario would be to have levels 21-30 be at the inhuman/wuxia/superhero level, including all the spells that demand fighters have those powers. I'm really almost as opposed to many of the higher level spells as I am to pseudo-magical warriors. I'll just play up to 20th level and have "300" be the top of the food chain.

 

[Anthtriel]

The RAW would require checks to avoid fatigue, which the fighter would eventually fail. When he collapes into a heap from exhaustion, he is easily caught by several dozen coup-de-grace attempts. That's enough critical hits to eventually fell him. The long and tedious process consigns him to death, eventually . . .

And how many warriors will the Level 20 Great Cleave fighter have slain by them? Per round, a fighter with a Spiked Chain and Great Cleave kills 25 of them. Even going mere 40 rounds, 4 minutes, would equal 1000 dead enemies.
Do you mind reciting the fatigue rules? I only found -6 penalties, not enough to stop the fighter. I realize he will eventually killed by the few attacks that do hit him (unless he invested into Damage Reduction), but that won't stop him from killing an army by himself.
And he can punch-out not one, but multiple elephants. At once.

That's not something Aragon or Lancelot can do. It's what Sauron, Siegfried or Hercules can do.

A high-level fighter without the ability to jump 60 feet or summon magical flame to his sword should be a very viable character build, but he will always have supernatural strength, reaction and speed. Just because he already has all that in 3.5, whether you like it or not.

 

[FourthBear]

I suspect that the reason the designers have broken up the game into Heroic, Paragon and Epic tiers is to conceptually break up the various game-changing powers into each. So Heroic will have PCs with abilities you could imagine from a Conan or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser novel. Paragon will start introducing things like flight, invisibility and short range teleportation. Epic will be where you get the really wonky stuff, like long range teleportation, radical shape-changing, etherealness and such. Hopefully this way they'll arrange for future supplments and power sources to roughly follow these as well. So every power could be labelled Heroic, Paragon or Epic and then to "dial down" the wackiness you could only allow Heroic powers in your game. Could be.

 

[PeterWeller]

For the same reason that Batman doesn't fly without an airplane, and can't generally lift cars and throw them at people.

At the same time, Batman can outfight Superman, outwit the Flash, and solve any crime put before him. Batman, Green Arrow, and Captain America all make good cases for fighters to have "powers" that put them on par with more overtly magical or mystical characters. With the exception of Cap's vaguely defined Super Soldier Serum, none of these guys have inherent powers, yet they are on par with their powered peers because of sheer grit, skill, and will. Sometimes they might have to rely on a magical item (Bats using kryptonite boxing gloves) to defeat their opponent, but for the most part, they rely on their skills to get them by in a world where people can move mountains.

I think most people are just worried that all of a sudden Fighters will be able to summon forth magic flames and fly through the air. I'd expect the powers to be much more mundane in their fluff.

 

[Mistwell]

Verisimilitude is not just realism. It is about the fantasty world being true to itself. Being the best swordsman in the world does not let you defy gravity.

Your personal belief about the word aside, the word means "depicting realism" or "truth". That's it. The definition is not specific to fantasy worlds or being the best swordsman and gravity. All the responses about realism address people claiming it's about "Verisimilitude", which is just a fancy way of saying "I want realism in my depictions". Swordsmen who are able to swing a sword strong enough to decapitate creatures in a single blow four times in a matter of seconds are not realistic or a depiction of "truth". Doing it with a magical sword, while wearing magical armor and a magical cloak and having magical healing potions that they can grab and drink in a matter of seconds is also not realistic or a depiction of "truth". Being able to leap from a 100' cliff and live from the fall because you have a lot of experience killing monsters is not realistic or "truth". That's the responses to this "Verisimilitude" claim, and they hold up. Verisimilitude is not compatible much with D&D.

If you guys mean something different than realism, then quit using the wrong word

 

[Raven Crowking]

Wanting D&D to allow for pulp and/or sword and sorcery heroes, at least out of the box, would require it to be a pulp and/or sword and sorcery game out of the box. It isn't. It passes briefly through that power level around levels 4-12, but outside of that, it's either grim n' gritty (1-3) or fantasy supers/mythic (13+).

As I said, I could tweak 3.X into the game I wanted; the question is how much tweaking will 4.0 require?

 

[Mistwell]

Hey, Mistwell, why don't you back off on the snarky assumptions about what other people think.

Will do

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think my best-case scenario would be to have levels 21-30 be at the inhuman/wuxia/superhero level, including all the spells that demand fighters have those powers. I'm really almost as opposed to many of the higher level spells as I am to pseudo-magical warriors. I'll just play up to 20th level and have "300" be the top of the food chain.

That might be a very good solution.

RC

 

[med stud]

I want a game that allows for characters like Conan, Tarzan, Solomon Kane, Beowulf, Fafrid, Indiana Jones, Doc Savage, and their ilk, as well as more mystically-oriented characters. I was able to tweak 3.X into that game. The question for me is, how much work will it be to do the same with 4.0?

RC

In that case I really don't think D&D is what you are looking for (I assume you have played a lot of games and that you are more experienced than me, but still). I came from a very BRP- influenced game where a character could get extremely skilled and extremely dangerous but still was vulnerable to a crossbow bolt in the back.

The first thing I noticed when looking through D&D for the first time was that a 3rd level fighter had no in game reason to be afraid when he was held up by someone with a crossbow; he could just take the bolt. I liked it in a way, since mortality in D&D wouldn't be as high as in the game I played in before but it also told me that I had to change the focus of the adventures; in the old game, you could always threaten the players with numbers, no matter how skilled the PCs were compared to the enemies. In D&D that's not true, you have to bring opponents that are approximatly at their skill level.

To bring my reasoning back on topic, I think that D&D is and has always been a game about over the top protagonists and when I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I thought to myself that the movie was a close match to D&D while I always thought that it was a shame that you couldn't duplicate Conan in D&D, at least not if Conan was to have a level above maybe 5.

So in keeping with that vein I think over the top abilities for warriors do nothing to detract from the "fighter feel" and do lot to add interesting, powerful abilities to warriors.

I agree with most though that I would like to see "physical themed" powers for warriors more than magical fires and teleporting in a flash.