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Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
EDIT: This thread's line of thought has moved far beyond my OP, anyway, if anyone wants to PM me about any martial fixes they have for high level martials, or what they feel about superhuman martials should be capable of from a conceptual level, go for it, I look forward to reading interpretations on them.
Before we begin, I want to say that this is my first post here, and I’ve read a few other threads about the Martial-Caster Disparity, Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard, and the “Guy at the Gym” Fallacy… So I decided to put my own thoughts on the subject into words, and see what other people interested in the subject have to say about it. These are just my opinion, but I do want to see what others have to say on the matter. This started out as me writing about the parts of the fallacy I noticed and problems with it, but then sort of took on a life of its own and I decided to post this here.
I’m going to say up front, I’m not going to tell you not to play a completely mundane character if you want to, that’s not what this is about. What I am going to point out is that a Level 20 character is anything but mundane though.
Let me know your thoughts on this if you agree or disagree. Or if the formatting is too confusing...
I wrote this mostly with 3.5E/Pathfinder and D&D 5E in mind, but I feel it can apply across the various editions of D&D (and derivatives), so I put it in the general Roleplaying Games forum. By the way, please let me know if this violates any forum rules.
The Guy At The Gym Fallacy in a nutshell: Mundane/martial characters should be limited to the limits of what is possible in our world. Magic is exempt from this same logic.
How it can manifest:
SCENARIO 1:
Player: So I’d like to use my sword to cleave through this door… I do about 70 points of damage
DM: Sorry, but that’s a steel door.
Player: But cannonballs do less damage than my attack on average…
DM: It’s not humanly possible, I don’t care if your character can do this much damage in a single round. You’re still just a guy with a sword.
SCENARIO 2:
Caster Player: I cast Fly and soar off the building! Let’s see them catch me now!
Martial Player: I jump off the building! The enemy can’t follow me down here with how little hit points they have!
GM: Caster Player, you’ve flown away from them and appear to be safe.
Caster Player: Yeah!
GM: Martial Player, you’re dead.
Martial Player: Why!?
GM: You jumped off a 50 story building and landed on concrete.
Martial Player: But my Hit Points-
GM: No human being could survive that, I don’t care how many hit points you have...
Martial Player: But I tanked like 5 Fireballs on the way here, I got clubbed by a Hill Giant last week and a Dragon set me on fire earlier yesterday!
GM: I don’t care, it’s not humanly possible to survive a fall from that height. And Hit Points are just an abstraction of damage, you’re not really tanking those blows… But fine… Most of the bones in your body are broken.
Martial Player: *Noticeable Frustration*
SCENARIO 3:
Martial Player: Ok, I do 200 points of damage to the Adult Red Dragon… Is it dead?
GM: Yes. Your swings had enough strength behind them to kill the mighty beast.
Martial Player: Ok, I’ll try to get through the locked door it was guarding…
GM: Yeah, it’s a thick metal door, you can’t bust through it.
On the surface, these might seem reasonable to some people… But there are huge amounts of cognitive dissonance at play here. The thing is, people want to hold martial characters (also known as mundane characters) to the same standards as a regular human being, while allowing magical characters to be able to do things that are outright impossible because “it’s magic.” Martial characters are essentially being told to just be what a guy at the gym in our world can do, while magical characters are allowed to become omni-magic gods.
It’s odd because the martial characters are routinely breaking the physics of our world through the amount of damage they can inflict and endure. The DM in this scenario is selectively ignoring the logical consequences of everything that should happen if they want to hold these characters to the boundaries of people in our world.
Let’s go ahead and continue the above scenarios of what the GM would consider perfectly reasonable despite limiting them afterwards.
SCENARIO 1 EXTENDED:
Player: So I’m through the door…
GM: You caused a lot of noise, about 12 guards are rushing towards you.
Player: Ok, I go ahead and engage them.
*Several Rounds later*
GM: You’ve killed all 12 of the guards and barely taken any damage.
Note: This is particularly strange, as I doubt anyone in the real world could kill 12 heavily armed men that have the home field advantage. Even trained MMA fighters say they’d probably run if they had to fight against 2 or more people. This character is both held outside the realms of our physical limitations and also within it at the same time, depending solely on what the GM considers possible. Then again, there is a legend of a Viking warrior killing 100 men before going down, but I doubt he was allowing them to surround him like the character in this scenario was, so… Possible I suppose.
SCENARIO 2 EXTENDED:
DM: You broke your legs…
Martial Player: Yeah…
Caster: I cast Regenerate/Heal!
DM: Your legs are now healed. Just in time too, because the enemy just released their two Enlarged Tyrannosauruses near where you are.
Martial Player:… Ok, I’ll attack.
*Several rounds later*
DM: You killed the two enlarged dinosaurs with your sword, what now?
Note: This part in particular is very confusing, as there is no way normal human being could possibly defeat an animal as large as dinosaur with just a sword and shield. If this is a Barbarian with no armor, it gets even more jarring. Now take into account that dinosaurs weighed several tons by themselves, these are Enlarged dinosaurs… No human being on our planet, whether they’re a weight lifter or a heavily trained warrior, is going to be able to kill such a massive animal in melee. They’d be lucky if the first hit didn’t just kill them on the spot. Let alone fighting two. This character is blatantly superhuman in terms of durability and striking power, but the DM still treats him like a regular human despite doing things that are physically impossible in our world.
SCENARIO THREE EXTENDED:
Player: So… I can’t get through the thick door…
DM: No, but you can probably find the key somewhere…
Player: But aren’t dragons basically reality warpers and have scales harder than metal? Why can I kill one of them but not get through this door?
DM: Not humanly possible…
Note: The DM is ok with having this character kill what amounts to a giant monster that, realistically, shouldn’t be bothered by the tiny mortal poking it with what amounts to a needle. Then the same DM wants this character to be hindered by something like a locked door.
As you can see, this is very confusing and makes it clear that the boundaries of what martial characters can do are an arbitrary line based solely preconceived notions that don’t hold up under even the most basic of questions.
Hit Points Are An Abstraction of Damage:
There are players who believe Hit Points are an abstraction of damage and they don’t represent physical durability. Because martial characters are just normal people, it’s impossible they’re surviving these types of attacks. This is another extension of the Guy at the Gym Fallacy, as someone who trains their body extensively isn’t going to be able to survive much more damage than the average person… There are, however, a few problems with the opinion Hit Points aren’t physical durability as well.
Hit Points Represent Dodging:
I’ll be the first to say that yes, it can represent that to a degree. Not in the sense that you’re completely dodging an attack, so much as you’re turning the blow into a glancing one. Understandable… Except it doesn’t really make sense for the much more powerful monsters.
Characters who do this regularly are superhuman in terms of reflexes. Take real world fighters for example, they’re able to dodge some attacks from other human beings, but nobody is perfect enough to dodge every single attack thrown at them ever. Now keep in these, that professional martial artists can get hit by other human beings… This brings up two things that should outright show PCs are superhuman.
- These normal human beings are so incredibly skilled at dodging that they’re able to dodge attacks from monsters and beings many times more powerful than the average man. These completely normal human beings are dodging attacks from ogres, trolls, giants, lions, tigers, bears, dinosaurs, armies of well trained men, dragons, eldritch abominations and demigods all the time… Every single fight. That is so far beyond anything anyone in the real world can do that there is no way these characters can be called normal or even peak human. If MMA fighters can get punched by other MMA fighters, I seriously doubt something as powerful as even an Ogre would have trouble hitting a peak human warrior. Or show me a man who goes into the wilderness and regularly fights dens of lions with melee weapons (or his bare hands) without getting hit once.
- There is a form of dodging, yes, it’s called AC. When something gets pass your AC, it actually hurts you, so you are taking damage when you take hit point damage…
- What’s being regenerated when a monster with Fast Healing or Regeneration starts getting Hit Points back every round? They’re regenerating dodges?
In summation, being able to dodge attacks entirely is ok for AC, but HP probably represents physical durability to a degree.
Hit Points Represent Mitigating Damage:
I have no problem with this either, but a glancing blow from getting punched by a human is probably not the same thing as a glancing blow from something like a Frost Giant. This is part of the previous point about “Hit Points Represent Dodging”. And mitigating damage has another term: Damage Reduction.
Hit Points Represent Plot Armor:
About that… This goes both ways for Hit Points. If Hit Points are called Plot Armor, what’s being healed when a character drinks a potion or a cleric casts Cure Wounds? They’re not called Cure Plot Armor. Same issue with Fast Healing and Regeneration on monsters, are they regenerating plot armor every round? And if it isn’t durability, that means that the second a Monster hits 0 HP or whatever negative value would kill it, it goes from “perfectly healthy giant monster” to “dead giant monster” in the span of 6 seconds.
Hit Points Don’t Represent Physical Durability:
This one in particular has a large issue with it. If Hit Points don’t represent durability, then it works both ways… So not only are these characters with hundreds of hit points just as vulnerable as a normal human being, so are the monsters. Let’s take this to its natural conclusion…
- That Troll got ran through by a sword, doesn’t matter how many hit points it has or can regenerate, it’s just dead. Hit Points don’t represent physical durability, so this automatically kills it.
- A Fighter with 200 hit points has their throat slit by someone in their sleep. They’re just normal human beings.
- A Fire Giant is just as likely to die from getting shot in the head by a pistol as average man. Hit Points aren’t durability, so it’s just as dead as a man when shot by a bullet.
- An Ancient Red Dragon is just as likely to die from some hobo shanking it in its sleep. Once again, Hit Points don’t recognize durability so it’s as dead as a normal human being in this scenario, regardless of how many hit points it has.
- You can kill the Tarrasque by hitting it really hard in the skull with a hammer.
See the issue here? If Hit Points don’t matter, there’s nothing stopping an ordinary human being from just sneaking up on something like the Tarrasque and slitting its throat… And since Hit Points don’t represent durability or health, it’s just as dead as anything else that has its throat slit. Regeneration is just an abstraction of damage too by the same logic, as regenerating plot armor won’t bring you back from death. Damage Reduction is also an abstraction of what’s happening, since it affects Hit Points, which aren’t related to actual health, so it shouldn’t matter either if you get a slit throat.
Think of it this way… The average human has less hit points than a large, predatory animal. A large predatory animal has more hit points to represent their toughness/durability. Magical beasts (such as the Tarrasque) have more hit points than large, predatory animals to represent their toughness. PCs have more hit points than some of these creatures to represent how tough they are. If you want Hit Points to not represent durability, then it should be applied to everything, otherwise it’s just a double standard.
It Reduces Martials to NPCs.
In a way, the current rules (to an extent) and opinions of Martial characters as being “Guys at the Gym” reduces them from legendary heroes to what would be NPCs in any other story. There’s nothing special or extraordinary about this character, he’s just a normal person who is there solely because the audience needs someone to identify with. Would you enjoy playing the Audience Surrogate who needs to be saved and is only alive because the main antagonist doesn’t consider you as much of a threat as say Dr. Strange? If you want to be that person, alright, but it would make much more sense if such a character were a low level character traveling with much higher level characters, or playing an NPC, instead of insisting a Level 20 Fighter/Barbarian/Rogue/Monk character is just a really skilled person who can somehow take on reality warping demi-gods. If you want to play a normal human fighting against impossibly overpowered enemies, why not just play a much lower character or an NPC, as that’s what they would amount to in a team based story.
It Means Casters and Martials Are Playing Two Different Games.
I’ve seen this on a few different forums, but the gist of it is, “Martials are playing Lord of the Rings, Casters are playing Mythology, Anime and Comics”.
Imagine Martials are playing as Aragorn, Gimli, and John McClane and in general fantasy and action heroes… While Casters are playing as Dr. Strange, Bayonetta, Zeus, and Naruto. It’d be more fair if Martials got to be more along the lines of Ryu Hayabusa, Kratos, Dante, Goku, Cu Chulainn or Thor, but as it stands the “Guy At The Gym” Fallacy keeps Martials much lower than Casters of the same level.
It Reduces Levels to Completely Arbitrary Numbers.
This one in particular is really disturbing. A Level 20 character is expected to be able to face off against things that would be considered far beyond the reach of an ordinary human being… By saying “Levels don’t matter” it removes the entire concept of even having levels at all. If a Level 20 Fighter can be beaten by a Level 10 Wizard, the concept of Levels don’t mean anything in regards to martial classes.
The strongest CREATURES in OUR world are at the lower end of midlevel.
In both D&D 3.5E and D&D 5E, even the mightiest of the dinosaurs like the tyrannosaurus is just CR 8-9. By even having levels (and appropriately being able to handle things with the appropriate CR) that go into the double digits, characters are already more powerful than the most powerful animals to walk our world… So why treat them like they’re still confined by our limitations?
“Because It’s Magic!”
I don’t quite understand why magic gets a free pass but martial might doesn’t. Using spell components in the real world won’t let you make a fire ball, neither will picking up a sword let you cleave a large animal in two with a single blow like high level martials can. The arguments that magic doesn’t have to be explained while martials being able to perform superhuman feats is also pretty hypocritical, as it’s giving one a free pass but ignoring another valid answer solely because of preconceived ideas. Either casters get a free pass, and martials do too, or neither do and both need to be explained.
Magic Is Supposed To Be Superior To Weapons.
… Based on what? There’s nothing to really support this beyond people saying it is. Just saying, “Because magic” isn’t more of an explanation than me saying, “Because training.” In some settings, magic is actually inferior to just picking up a gun or a sword and just killing your enemy, so why must it be superior here? This explanation in particular just sounds like an appeal to emotion without anything to back it up.
What’s the Justification for Training Making You Superhuman?
What’s the justification for reading books making you a reality warper? The same logic applies, only magic gets a pass because “it’s magic” which isn’t any more of a reason than training really hard makes you beyond human.
Martial Characters Were Divine In Some Way In Mythologies, So They’d Need To be Divine In the Game Too To Justify Being Superhuman
True, but Merlin was part demon and Gandalf was essentially an angel. By using this logic, you’re giving them a free pass because magic.
If we wanted to apply the same logic, Wizards shouldn’t be able to become nearly as powerful as they are through studying, as they would need to have a divine lineage to be able to do anything. That means Wizards need to be explained too, as only Sorcerers are able to use magic if we use this reasoning. If Wizards can get a free pass because they studied really hard, why can’t martials get one too by training really hard?
Also, I could just be forgetting parts of the story, but Beowulf was not divine in any way and he could swim for days on end and not be able to use normal swords without shattering them because of how strong he was.
Level 20 is Peak Human:
No, not even close. At the present moment, the world’s best human wouldn’t break into the double digits in terms of level. A Level 10 character is expected to be able to hold their own against beasts like Frost Giants and predator dinosaurs, as well as being able to easily dispatch of things like large, modern predatory animals.
A Level 20 character would be capable of:
- Surviving getting mauled by several large, predatory animals at once and be fine.
- Get shot a bunch and be able to sleep it off.
- Stroll through lava.
- Jump out of planes without parachutes and be fine.
- Down several containers of poisons and be perfectly fine.
- Dodge lightning strikes and explosions at near point blank range.
- Routinely defeat animals capable of easily killing a normal man… Who here thinks Conner McGregor would be able to go punch out several bears with incredible easy? Mike Tyson? Muhammad Ali?
For sake of reference, a tyrannosaurus isn’t even a CR 10 creature. A Level 20 character would destroy several CR 10 creatures. No human being on the planet would be able to defeat a CR 4+ creature with their bare hands and come out of it only slightly annoyed.
- Captain America is Peak Human, but he’s not Level 20.
- Action Heroes are Peak Human, but they’re not Level 20 either.
- A highly trained soldier isn’t Level 20 either.
- Real world fighters are NOT Level 20.
- Level 20 characters share CR with (or are at least around the same ball park) and are expected to fight things like reality warping demon lords, dragons, eldritch abominations, etc… Mike Tyson in his prime isn’t going to punch out an elephant, let alone a Balor or an Adult Red Dragon. Mike Tyson is nowhere near Level 20. People who believe he is, is why the fallacy exists.
- So… Let’s go ahead and look at something interesting (to me anyway).
- Frost Giants, those things that Thor fights, are CR 9.
- A Tyrannosaurus, those giant animals that would destroy even the world’s best warrior in melee, is CR 9.
- A Gorilla (AKA ape), one of those animals that would maul anyone in the real world is beyond CR 4 in both 3.5E and 5E. There are videos online showing how powerful l they are.
- Brown Bears are below CR5… They would also maul any real world human being in melee.
- All except the Frost Giants are real world creatures, and like I said, all of them are below CR 10. A Level 20 character is far beyond that. A Level 20 character, regardless of class, is beyond the power of our strongest animals so shouldn’t be held by the same limitations as them.
“D&D/Pathfinder and other such games model settings in the vein of Lord of the Rings.”
Actually, D&D/Pathfinder doesn’t have a particular setting in mind. It has the standard fantasy tropes, along with classes like Monks (Eastern fantasy, where superhuman warriors are common), Psions (psychics are not in traditional fantasy), creatures from various world mythologies and eldritch abominations taken from the Cthulhu Mythos. There’s also aliens in Pathfinder, not too sure about D&D though. Regardless of game or edition, I think the second ki using monks are introduced, you shouldn’t limit yourself to traditional fantasy tropes. These games are a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, they don’t accurately model one particular setting, and trying to force the “completely mundane warrior” into such a setting is simply trying to force your personal preferences onto other players.
It’s Too Wuxia/Anime to Have Superhuman Warriors.
Monks are powered by ki, and Shonen anime has ki in it to explain why the characters can perform the superhuman feats present… So why is this an issue to anyone? Monks are already in the game, as is ki, and Martials in general are already performing blatantly superhuman feats from numbers alone.
Also, there’s a feat called Smash from the Air for D&D 3.5E/Pathfinder that lets characters at Level 9 (well, ones with +9 BAB) smash ballista bolts and boulders from the air as long as they’re considered a projectile weapon… So the Martial is clearly superhuman in this instance. No one is going to see a guy smash a flying boulder out of the air with a sword and think, “Yeah, that’s completely within the realms of a normal human.” That’s something I’d expect from anime, not Lord of the Rings.
And about it being too anime/wuxia… It’s not so much that, as anime looks a lot like mythology.
Hercules held up the sky and split a continent because he didn’t feel like taking the long way around it.
Thor made canyons by hitting mountains really hard, lowered the ocean by drinking it and lifted the world serpent to the point where it was feared he might accidentally destroy the world.
Beowulf, as I mentioned above, could swim for days, tore off Grendel’s arm, swam down for about a day or so (been a while since I read the story), and couldn’t use the swords of ordinary men without shattering them because of his strength.
Cu Chulainn could throw stone pillars around, lift up a portion of a castle, killed a man by throwing a chess piece through his skull and use a stone from a sling to kill hundreds of people.
Sun Wu Kong could leap incredibly long distances and battle the armies of Heaven when he felt like it.
The “Guy At The Gym” Fallacy Taken To Its Logical Conclusion (No Double Standards).
This is what the Guy At The Gym Fallacy would look like if you wanted to really enforce the limitations of real life onto a fantasy game.
Whenever a character of any class doesn’t have the right AC to dodge an attack by something CR 4+… You’re dead. Doesn’t matter how many hit points you have, you just die because “nobody in the real world could survive getting hit by something this strong.”
The second a spell like Fireball is used, “You all are dead if you fail the save, and the rest of you are crippled if you do… And no, Rogue, I don’t care if you take no damage from your class, nobody can dodge an explosion at point blank and not get a little injured.”
You fail a save to dodge a spiked pit trap? “You’re dead, nobody is surviving getting impaled by all those spikes. Your hit points aren’t going to help you here.”
Whenever a character hits another character with an absurdly high amount of damage, “Yeah, you hit it for 100 damage… But because of how much force you hit the enemy with, your sword and the bones in your arms are shattered because people can’t hit things that hard without hurting themselves.”
Whenever a high level martial character is forced to fight a large monster in melee, “Yeah, so, that 100 points of damage isn’t getting really doing much… You’re the size of this thing’s fingernail, how do you expect to even damage it? I don’t care if it’s a magic sword or not, imagine an ant trying to kill you by biting your toe, it’s not going to happen unless you have an allergic reaction to it. Oh, it attacks and you’re dead. Yeah, AC doesn’t matter when all it has to do is raise its foot and lower it on you.”
This next part is also what I feel is applicable if this fallacy is also applied to Casters too, since if Martials are just regular people then…
“Magic doesn’t exist in the real world, so a Level 20 Wizard is just David Copperfield at max level… Yeah, that’s fun, right?”
“I don’t care what your spells say, a Level 20 Cleric is just a mega preacher, use your flock of followers to get stuff done.”
“A Level 20 Druid is just a hippy who likes animals. They can’t turn into a bear, but they take drugs that make them hallucinate becoming a bear… And no, you can’t talk to animals either.”
Does it sound fun to limit fantastic characters to the limits of what real people can do? Why apply it to just martials but not everyone? Why apply selective limits on fantasy characters to the limits of what real world people can do at all? If a fantasy magic user can be a reality warper that surpass mythological/anime/comic book casters, why not let fantasy martials be able to pull off some mythological/anime/comic book levels of power? If a fantasy martial is limited to what real world people can do, so should fantasy casters, otherwise it’s just a double standard.
This also brings up serious questions I have about how these normal human beings are even alive long enough to make it to Level 20, as realistically, anything should be capable of one shotting them. I also have to wonder why anyone would even bother bringing this person on a journey into the Abyss/Hell/whatever.
Then It’d Just Be Giving Them Magic With a Different Name
Not particularly, as a lot of what I, and I hope others, would like to see from Martials with skills and abilities appropriate for their level isn’t necessarily magic. There’s no casting, it works in an anti-magic field, and it’s done because the characters are just so inhumanly strong that they can pull off things like leaping miles into the air and cleaving mountains in half. If we qualify anything that isn’t possible in our world as magic, then literally the Hulk, Superman, Spider-Man, Goku, Kenshiro and all other martial characters are casters… Which I don’t agree with, as a lot of them have a distinction between spellcasters and incredibly powerful warriors.
I’m not even against letting martials cleave holes into other planes of existence through being just so superhumanly skilled at cutting things, or letting Rogues be so skilled at stealing things that they can pick metaphorical locks. Would it be magic? If mythological heroes violating the laws of physics counts as magic, then yes… Otherwise, no.
In summation.
I’m not against people wanting to play ordinary, down to earth heroes, but those characters probably wouldn’t be above Level 10 at the most… It’d be like arguing a Level 20 Cleric is a mega priest instead of someone approaching the level of a demi-god.
Wanting to play such characters are fine, but it’d probably be less confusing to put the proper level on them and maybe just play an NPC at that point, otherwise you’d end up with trying to pass off someone like Dr. Strange as Merlin when the levels are completely different.
As an aside, I’d like to say I think it would be better if the classes were more transparent with how superhuman characters are after a certain level. A Level 20 Barbarian feels far less powerful than a character at Level 20 should be.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
The Insanity
That's a necro-thread He can't comment there. I also think he's better off creating a new thread with a solid premise that can inspire better discussion.
Hello, AntiAuthority!
Welcome to the play ground, great first post conversation!
I think you make a lot of solid points I will consider as a DM. I think this is not a system agnostic issue however, I think 5e makes things more grounded to an extent, whereas a Pathfinder/3.5 allow things to get a bit more out of control.
I would expect a 3.5/PF barbarian to reach demigod level feats, I would think a 5e Barbarian is more or less just a very skilled combatant with crazy resistance. Essentially street level Luke Cage vs Hulk.
Though I would like to add that I am currently playing a Caster Goliath with 14 STR and I get treated as much stronger than the Aaricokra (SP?) Paladin with an 16-18 in STR simply because I am a Goliath.
This is a fallacy I see many DMs do simply because I play a Goliath, they tend to favor them as strong imposing characters regardless of playstyle or stats.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Drache64
That's a necro-thread He can't comment there.
He can't. It's closed. He can read it tho.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
People who object to the fact that D&D devolves into fantasy superheroes/anime bull**** would be better served by playing a different system that avoids that sort of thing. If you insist on playing D&D you ought to lean into the absurdities inherent to the system.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
To Antiauthority: I think we are going to get along. This is well organized, well argued and well formatted. I think the scenario 1 & 3 are kind of the same but other than that this is a well polished essay. Admittedly I agree with everything I read in it so maybe I'm just biased. Also your name gives me hope.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
I'd like to add that Vancian Spell Casting (Having spells "Prepared" that are fired off a finate amount of times in a day, typically) is a violation of Grod's Law - You can't and won't balance something by making it complicated to use.
When we get into the Quadratic caster problem, I usually say it's often unfair for later level play when some monsters are designed to have qualities that require (Or at least, are easily solvable by) spells slots being expended either in benefit of the Martial or that the Martial has X item that alleviates this. This creates a rift in teamwork, not encourages it. For example, Black Dragons usually live in Swamps and have wings. Monks are not natively proficient in ranged weapons aside from darts (and Javelins? I think? AFB right now, but I'm almost 100% sure they can't use Bow and arrows). If I don't have the Black Dragon in a cave (Which is an odd place to set up camp in a swamp), the Monk has to have a means of attacking at range or flight. Further, Black Dragons have acid breath and Monks have good Dex saves, but no native means of protecting themselves from said Acid damage. Further, Black Dragons have Spell casting and no native means of countering spells. So, the Casters in the party have to make some decisions on what is the best use of their actions to keep the Monk in the fight at all.
In other words, the Monk is actively weakening the greatest strength of the Casters abilities - they have to make sure he can participate in the fight in the first place by using their resources to enhance the Monk to their level.
If I were to drop something like a ring of flying prior to this encounter, the only reason the Monk needs it more then the Wizard or Cleric is that the Monk has no native means to fly... but if a wizard can cast a spell to allow him to fly, it allows the wizard to stay further out of harms way while the Monk would use it to get into harms way, by nature of being a Monk. Further, some of the few advantages Monks do have is in mobility which a ring of Flying would actively be a detriment to. Leap of the Clouds doesn't mean much if you can fly.
When playing with new players who don't have experience in D&D, and I tell them to play whatever class speaks to them, they usually steer away from spell casters because it's more complicated, but the Bards and Clerics/Druids and wizards that do play spell casters, they tend to get really frustrated when people start competing for magic items to let them step up to the spell casters level.
Either way, the magic items saves them a spell slot that don't have to cast anymore either on themselves or on their Mundane team mates, but more often then not, it makes it feel like a chore to make sure your team mates have the ability to do what the game is expected to have available to them. Resist elements, Magic attacks of some kind to get around resistances (Why do Rangers get one-uped by Wizards in Killing Werewolves!?), Elemental attacks to capitalize on weaknesses, a way to undo Debuffs used by your opponents, and so so many more examples that are just soaked into the bones of this system.
Not to mention straight up instances where Magic is the only means of overcoming a problem. A Barbarian isn't going to lift a block of stone or something to undo Petrification for example.
The argument that Wizards only have so many spell slots available and have to pick out their spells ahead of time is a red herring - Unless a wizard is very new to the system, they aren't going to prepare "Leomund's instant counting" as a first level spell slot when Shield is available to them. And if you ever have a spell prepared that you wish you didn't, just ignore it exists and don't prepare it again. Instead, prepare what you wish you did have prepared in that instance.
Then, the problem becomes constantly putting your party on a clock so that the limited spell slots becomes an issue... except it isn't, because if going in without spell slots is going to cause a defeat of the party (See above, with the black dragon example), then the party has the choice of almost automatically losing OR waiting until day break to get spell slots back and taking a half victory (Yes, the children were devoured by the hag, but the Hag has been slain so no more children will be eaten).
"But what if the Wizard doesn't have that spell prepared" is NOT a counter argument I listen too, anymore. I've run too many games where wizards are able to trivialize encounters single handily without going Nova. If they do go Nova, the party drops everything to take a long rest so he can be at full strength.
This is why I want to use M&M to play D&D from here on out.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Part of the problem is the inverse guy in the gym fallacy -- the way some gamers insist that their martial characters who can do all these things and who are supposed to be balanced with high-level casters... are still utterly mundane and not "extra-normal" or superhuman or magical at all. That is, THEY insist that their martial character IS the "guy at the gym", and that this "guy at the gym" is able to take down epic wizards and demigods and ancient dragons.
I'd also add that this issue is NOT setting or system agnostic. It's a big problem in the D&D series of systems... much less of a problem or not a problem at all in other systems.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
“Because It’s Magic!”
I don’t quite understand why magic gets a free pass but martial might doesn’t. Using spell components in the real world won’t let you make a fire ball, neither will picking up a sword let you cleave a large animal in two with a single blow like high level martials can. The arguments that magic doesn’t have to be explained while martials being able to perform superhuman feats is also pretty hypocritical, as it’s giving one a free pass but ignoring another valid answer solely because of preconceived ideas. Either casters get a free pass, and martials do too, or neither do and both need to be explained.
In D&D, 'magic' means drawing on some other force than just muscles and nerves. That force varies, ranging from hacking the code of reality (arcane magic), borrowing power from a divine entity (divine magic), channeling the power of the mind (psionics), and a whole bunch of other obscure forms including monk Ki and so on. D&D absolutely allows martials to acquire supernatural powers through various means, but just training your body is supposed to have limits roughly in the normal human zone.
There is a reason for this setup, and it has to do with overall world design methodology. The idea is that you take a 'normal' medieval world and then you add magical elements rather than making an explicitly magical world. The problem D&D has - especially editions from 3e onwards - is that it adds too much magic. There's too much frosting on the cake.
Quote:
What’s the Justification for Training Making You Superhuman?
What’s the justification for reading books making you a reality warper? The same logic applies, only magic gets a pass because “it’s magic” which isn’t any more of a reason than training really hard makes you beyond human.
There is a justification for being a reality warper in D&D - there's actually several since there are various different methods for becoming one. There isn't one for training really hard to become superman. That doesn't necessarily mean there shouldn't be, just that there isn't in standard D&D. You can add a new one - Tome of Battle kind of does - and that's a perfectly acceptable approach.
Quote:
“D&D/Pathfinder and other such games model settings in the vein of Lord of the Rings.”
Actually, D&D/Pathfinder doesn’t have a particular setting in mind. It has the standard fantasy tropes, along with classes like Monks (Eastern fantasy, where superhuman warriors are common), Psions (psychics are not in traditional fantasy), creatures from various world mythologies and eldritch abominations taken from the Cthulhu Mythos. There’s also aliens in Pathfinder, not too sure about D&D though. Regardless of game or edition, I think the second ki using monks are introduced, you shouldn’t limit yourself to traditional fantasy tropes. These games are a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, they don’t accurately model one particular setting, and trying to force the “completely mundane warrior” into such a setting is simply trying to force your personal preferences onto other players.
There are literally hundreds of D&D novels, spread across several settings. We absolutely do know what sort of setting D&D/Pathfinder has in mind. It's not Lord of the Rings level, true, but it's nowhere near the level of power displayed by high Tier, high Optimization 3.X edition characters. The worlds that D&D wants to be (even though it fails to model them properly) restrict the presence of magic and with the exception of the highest reaches of the mighty still allow normal humans with normal human abilities to contribute.
Quote:
The “Guy At The Gym” Fallacy Taken To Its Logical Conclusion (No Double Standards).
This is what the Guy At The Gym Fallacy would look like if you wanted to really enforce the limitations of real life onto a fantasy game.
Whenever a character of any class doesn’t have the right AC to dodge an attack by something CR 4+… You’re dead. Doesn’t matter how many hit points you have, you just die because “nobody in the real world could survive getting hit by something this strong.”
The second a spell like Fireball is used, “You all are dead if you fail the save, and the rest of you are crippled if you do… And no, Rogue, I don’t care if you take no damage from your class, nobody can dodge an explosion at point blank and not get a little injured.”
You fail a save to dodge a spiked pit trap? “You’re dead, nobody is surviving getting impaled by all those spikes. Your hit points aren’t going to help you here.”
Whenever a character hits another character with an absurdly high amount of damage, “Yeah, you hit it for 100 damage… But because of how much force you hit the enemy with, your sword and the bones in your arms are shattered because people can’t hit things that hard without hurting themselves.”
Whenever a high level martial character is forced to fight a large monster in melee, “Yeah, so, that 100 points of damage isn’t getting really doing much… You’re the size of this thing’s fingernail, how do you expect to even damage it? I don’t care if it’s a magic sword or not, imagine an ant trying to kill you by biting your toe, it’s not going to happen unless you have an allergic reaction to it. Oh, it attacks and you’re dead. Yeah, AC doesn’t matter when all it has to do is raise its foot and lower it on you.”
You're exaggerating here, a lot. First of all, many CR 4+ monsters aren't particularly physically strong at all. A CR 11 Hezrou only has a strength of 21, significantly weaker than a rhino, and people do survive getting hit and even gored by rhinos. With regard to fireball, explosions are funny and do weird things, besides, a fireball doesn't project any solid matter on its own, making actually less dangerous than your average grenade, which is by no means an instant kill to everyone in a room if you toss one in. A fall into a pit trap might not be fatal, depending upon armor, how much force you fall with, how you hit, and a lot more. People can and do kill very large animals in melee - humans have been killing elephants with spears since the stone tool era, large animals have large arteries and can be sliced and bled to death if you know what you're doing.
Quote:
Does it sound fun to limit fantastic characters to the limits of what real people can do? Why apply it to just martials but not everyone? Why apply selective limits on fantasy characters to the limits of what real world people can do at all? If a fantasy magic user can be a reality warper that surpass mythological/anime/comic book casters, why not let fantasy martials be able to pull off some mythological/anime/comic book levels of power? If a fantasy martial is limited to what real world people can do, so should fantasy casters, otherwise it’s just a double standard.
The existence of viable martial characters who are simply normal humans in a setting does not mean you can't have characters with supernatural powers and still have balance between the two groups. It just means there's a ceiling on how powerful those characters can be. This ceiling is dynamic and depends on how much technology the normal humans have access too. A world in which an infantryman walks around in powered Iron Man armor can have adventures alongside a wizard of far greater power than a guy with a steel sword and chain mail.
Quote:
Then It’d Just Be Giving Them Magic With a Different Name
Not particularly, as a lot of what I, and I hope others, would like to see from Martials with skills and abilities appropriate for their level isn’t necessarily magic. There’s no casting, it works in an anti-magic field, and it’s done because the characters are just so inhumanly strong that they can pull off things like leaping miles into the air and cleaving mountains in half. If we qualify anything that isn’t possible in our world as magic, then literally the Hulk, Superman, Spider-Man, Goku, Kenshiro and all other martial characters are casters… Which I don’t agree with, as a lot of them have a distinction between spellcasters and incredibly powerful warriors.
I’m not even against letting martials cleave holes into other planes of existence through being just so superhumanly skilled at cutting things, or letting Rogues be so skilled at stealing things that they can pick metaphorical locks. Would it be magic? If mythological heroes violating the laws of physics counts as magic, then yes… Otherwise, no.
Mythological heroes violating the laws of physics absolutely counts as magic. Any violation of the laws of physics qualifies, for a sufficiently broad definition of magic. If you want to be super-generic you can call it 'phlebotinum-dependent' but it doesn't really matter. The fact that characters with superpowers can have different kinds of superpowers with completely different flavors, focuses, and justifications has nothing to do with the difference between characters who have superpowers and those who do not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy
Part of the problem is the inverse guy in the gym fallacy -- the way some gamers insist that their martial characters who can do all these things and who are supposed to be balanced with high-level casters... are still utterly mundane and not "extra-normal" or superhuman or magical at all. That is, THEY insist that their martial character IS the "guy at the gym", and that this "guy at the gym" is able to take down epic wizards and demigods and ancient dragons.
Many gamers are extremely hesitant to embrace the reality that, in fantasy world X, only the powered people matter and everyone else is a helpless drone doomed to suffer at their merest whim. They want the mundane peasant to be able to take down the evil wizard, because as long as they can carry that particular torch they have a light against the overwhelming grimdark of a fantasy setting where only a tiny number of high-level people matter and the best you can hope to be is their pet. Exalted, it is worth noting, was actually brave enough to come out and build a setting where only the Exalted mattered, and really only a sub-fraction of those (700 people were the only ones of consequence in the whole world), and that setting is positively drowning in grimdark.
Superhero settings - which is what you get if you give D&D martials power equal to the casters - have huge issues that rely on massive quantities of cognitive dissonance both to function and to avoid falling into their own grimdark pit. I suspect a lot of support for the 'inverse guy at the gym' including by many well known fantasy novelists, comes from this place.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Mythological heroes violating the laws of physics absolutely counts as magic. Any violation of the laws of physics qualifies, for a sufficiently broad definition of magic. If you want to be super-generic you can call it 'phlebotinum-dependent' but it doesn't really matter. The fact that characters with superpowers can have different kinds of superpowers with completely different flavors, focuses, and justifications has nothing to do with the difference between characters who have superpowers and those who do not.
Because some players don't like "magic" used in a broad sense and kept taking it to mean "spellcasting" or similar even when it's explained that a far broader meaning is intended... some of us started using terms like "extra-normal".
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Many gamers are extremely hesitant to embrace the reality that, in fantasy world X, only the powered people matter and everyone else is a helpless drone doomed to suffer at their merest whim. They want the mundane peasant to be able to take down the evil wizard, because as long as they can carry that particular torch they have a light against the overwhelming grimdark of a fantasy setting where only a tiny number of high-level people matter and the best you can hope to be is their pet. Exalted, it is worth noting, was actually brave enough to come out and build a setting where only the Exalted mattered, and really only a sub-fraction of those (700 people were the only ones of consequence in the whole world), and that setting is positively drowning in grimdark.
Superhero settings - which is what you get if you give D&D martials power equal to the casters - have huge issues that rely on massive quantities of cognitive dissonance both to function and to avoid falling into their own grimdark pit. I suspect a lot of support for the 'inverse guy at the gym' including by many well known fantasy novelists, comes from this place.
From past conversations, there's also the factor of "my heroes from fantasy were extraordinary men, but fundamentally human and not magic at all, who defeated sorcerers and warlocks through the strength of their arm and the wits of their head and the grit of their heart and the steel of their sword." They want to play Conan or the like, defeating the wicked diabolist or dark necromancer. If there's a wizard ally, they're like the wizard in the Conan movie. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's a huge part of the genre and can be a lot of fun... but D&D just is not the system for that campaign.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Mythological heroes violating the laws of physics absolutely counts as magic. Any violation of the laws of physics qualifies, for a sufficiently broad definition of magic.
You know I often joke that I have four definitions of the word magic. Today or yesterday I counted them and realized the list had grown to 5.
However here only two of them are important: the literary definition of magic which is what is impossible in real life but possible in the story and the thematic definition of magic covering hidden secrets, divine intervention and occult forces. Mythological heroes breaking our laws of physics is the former but may not be the second. Being stronger than a real human could be just because you trained hard (and maybe have good genes from a divine parent) isn't magic. There is no hidden secret... OK a kind of indirect divine intervention but definitely no occult forces. (And that isn't what I meant by divine intervention, if it was any setting created by gods would entirely be magic.)
So what I guess I am saying is "for a sufficiently broad definition of magic" is the problem because often in these discussions aren't using the broader definitions of magic, but a narrower one that has to do with the look and feel and not the mere plausibility of it all. Of course I don't know if AntiAuthority was using this meaning, but the post makes more sense if they were, so I figured they were. There is a The Giant quote about assumptions fitting the text that would go well here.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
From past conversations, there's also the factor of "my heroes from fantasy were extraordinary men, but fundamentally human and not magic at all, who defeated sorcerers and warlocks through the strength of their arm and the wits of their head and the grit of their heart and the steel of their sword." They want to play Conan or the like, defeating the wicked diabolist or dark necromancer. If there's a wizard ally, they're like the wizard in the Conan movie. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's a huge part of the genre and can be a lot of fun... but D&D just is not the system for that campaign.
Well, D&D works okay for that campaign...in E6. It is entirely possible for a party of characters who are mostly mortal and don't have an explicitly innate superhuman powers (they probably have a bunch of gear) to defeat a level necromancer or a CR 12 Young Adult dragon. It's also possible for a thousand man army to take down a tribe of frost giants, but not a platoon of vrocks.
D&D is discordant. A huge amount of D&D fiction is based on having an E6-style world, limiting the presence of high-level casters, powerful monsters, and the like. Heck, in the original Dragonlance Chronicles, the dragons themselves are straight up smaller than they would later become. At the same time, there's also D&D fiction about high-level wizards running around and manipulating reality on a scale that renders armies and swords irrelevant and the juggling act to try and pretend you can have both these things in the same world (FR most notably) is constant and I'm pretty sure requires a massive amount of cognitive dissonance on the part of Ed Greenwood.
D&D's development involving working from a lot of sources - Nehwon is probably the best example - that had guy at the gym martials with a solid ceiling on their capabilities who faced down supernatural threats that did not exceed the ability of such persons (with a modest boost from equipment or intelligence) to defeat, while at the same time also containing characters with access to supernatural powers that were exponentially greater but who were 'plot-device only elements.' Ningauble and Sheelba could turn Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inside out with a thought, but they just...don't. The initial design of D&D unfortunately took examples that weren't capable of operating as characters on the same playing field and conflated them together.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cluedrew
So what I guess I am saying is "for a sufficiently broad definition of magic" is the problem because often in these discussions aren't using the broader definitions of magic, but a narrower one that has to do with the look and feel and not the mere plausibility of it all. Of course I don't know if AntiAuthority was using this meaning, but the post makes more sense if they were, so I figured they were. There is a The Giant quote about assumptions fitting the text that would go well here.
The thing is, its the broader definition that matters, not the look and the feel.
Basically there are several ways to produce a fictional world.
Method One: the world fundamentally follows the same rules as our own with regard to physical laws in ordinary circumstances, but there are extraordinary circumstances were those laws can be violated. I would summarize this as 'Normal, but...' This is the most common way to build a fantasy world and the overwhelming majority of settings are built this way.
Method Two: the world is fundamentally different from the known universe and follows a completely different set of laws. It's an outright magical world. However, whatever the rules to this world might be, they apply everywhere. There's no 'magic' there's simply the powers that exist in this world according to the new physical laws. This method is common in 'everyone has magic' types of fantasy settings. Jim Butcher's Codex Alera setting, where every object is tied to a 'fury' based around one of the classic elements, works this way.
Method Three: the world is fundamentally different from our own at the level of physical laws and there's ways to violate those laws too as a form of 'magic.' Settings of this nature tend to have major coherency problems, because it is often difficult to tell what is responsible for what. Warhammer 40K probably qualifies as a good example. Many isekai anime also do this - as the fantasy world will have some particular rule set and the titular character will have the special ability to violate those rules because they're from another world.
Method Four: screw the rules. Worlds of this nature simply do not have internal consistency. There are no laws of physics there is only what the narrative demands. This is more common then you might think and includes new worlds created in stories heavy on folklore (many of the works of Charles de Lint), magical realism (Pan's Labyrinth), or cosmic horror (HP Lovecrafts dreamlands stories).
For game purposes you're generally making a world using either Method One or Method Two. The trick here is that building a world with any sort of decent verisimilitude using the latter is really, really hard (Codex Alera, which I mentioned above, if a fun set of action-adventure novels, but totally fails this test). Outright magical worlds are therefore more common in video games, which can drastically limit the ability of characters to interact with their worlds and therefore simply shunt everything that doesn't make sense off-screen. JRPGs do this all the time.
In tabletop, however, characters can go anywhere, do anything they want, and they can interact with society in far more complex ways than 'go into the dungeon/ruined city/hellscape and kill the elder evil.' It is impossible to detail a magical world sufficiently that it will anticipate what players will actually try to do within it, in order to make the game work you have either provide some sort of default scenario for GMs to fall back on or you have to say 'f-it, everything is crazy' which tends to mean giving up and going down the method four path (Planescape does this, as do some other dimension-hopping type games) but this has storytelling.
We can see how the fallback method works best in the case of games that are set in the present day on Earth. The genius of Vampire: the Masquerade, for example, was the word 'masquerade' a plausible explanation for how you could have our world in the late 20th century + vampires (VtM has tons of problems, but the masquerade idea at the core is a solid one). In fantasy games like D&D the backdrop can't be the modern world, so instead the design simply turns the clock back 6-12 centuries to the Medieval Period and establishes that as the new default. That's a wildly imperfect method, since it doesn't properly consider the impacts of the supernatural on how development occurred, but it's a workable one. However, you can only do this in a Method One design. An inherently magical world will not produce a recognizably quasi-medieval world, instead it will produce something unique that is dependent upon its magical system. Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive is a useful example here, because he made a fairly determined effort to determine how his world would actually work and absolutely everything is different, down to the basic ecology.
So the difference between 'gained superpowers by just training really hard' versus 'gained superpowers by studying the secrets of sword BS' isn't just semantic, it reflects a fundamental difference in how the fantasy world functions.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Well, D&D works okay for that campaign...in E6. It is entirely possible for a party of characters who are mostly mortal and don't have an explicitly innate superhuman powers (they probably have a bunch of gear) to defeat a level necromancer or a CR 12 Young Adult dragon. It's also possible for a thousand man army to take down a tribe of frost giants, but not a platoon of vrocks.
D&D is discordant. A huge amount of D&D fiction is based on having an E6-style world, limiting the presence of high-level casters, powerful monsters, and the like. Heck, in the original Dragonlance Chronicles, the dragons themselves are straight up smaller than they would later become. At the same time, there's also D&D fiction about high-level wizards running around and manipulating reality on a scale that renders armies and swords irrelevant and the juggling act to try and pretend you can have both these things in the same world (FR most notably) is constant and I'm pretty sure requires a massive amount of cognitive dissonance on the part of Ed Greenwood.
D&D's development involving working from a lot of sources - Nehwon is probably the best example - that had guy at the gym martials with a solid ceiling on their capabilities who faced down supernatural threats that did not exceed the ability of such persons (with a modest boost from equipment or intelligence) to defeat, while at the same time also containing characters with access to supernatural powers that were exponentially greater but who were 'plot-device only elements.' Ningauble and Sheelba could turn Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inside out with a thought, but they just...don't. The initial design of D&D unfortunately took examples that weren't capable of operating as characters on the same playing field and conflated them together.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
The thing is, its the broader definition that matters, not the look and the feel.
Basically there are several ways to produce a fictional world.
Method One: the world fundamentally follows the same rules as our own with regard to physical laws in ordinary circumstances, but there are extraordinary circumstances were those laws can be violated. I would summarize this as 'Normal, but...' This is the most common way to build a fantasy world and the overwhelming majority of settings are built this way.
Method Two: the world is fundamentally different from the known universe and follows a completely different set of laws. It's an outright magical world. However, whatever the rules to this world might be, they apply everywhere. There's no 'magic' there's simply the powers that exist in this world according to the new physical laws. This method is common in 'everyone has magic' types of fantasy settings. Jim Butcher's Codex Alera setting, where every object is tied to a 'fury' based around one of the classic elements, works this way.
Method Three: the world is fundamentally different from our own at the level of physical laws and there's ways to violate those laws too as a form of 'magic.' Settings of this nature tend to have major coherency problems, because it is often difficult to tell what is responsible for what. Warhammer 40K probably qualifies as a good example. Many isekai anime also do this - as the fantasy world will have some particular rule set and the titular character will have the special ability to violate those rules because they're from another world.
Method Four: screw the rules. Worlds of this nature simply do not have internal consistency. There are no laws of physics there is only what the narrative demands. This is more common then you might think and includes new worlds created in stories heavy on folklore (many of the works of Charles de Lint), magical realism (Pan's Labyrinth), or cosmic horror (HP Lovecrafts dreamlands stories).
For game purposes you're generally making a world using either Method One or Method Two. The trick here is that building a world with any sort of decent verisimilitude using the latter is really, really hard (Codex Alera, which I mentioned above, if a fun set of action-adventure novels, but totally fails this test). Outright magical worlds are therefore more common in video games, which can drastically limit the ability of characters to interact with their worlds and therefore simply shunt everything that doesn't make sense off-screen. JRPGs do this all the time.
In tabletop, however, characters can go anywhere, do anything they want, and they can interact with society in far more complex ways than 'go into the dungeon/ruined city/hellscape and kill the elder evil.' It is impossible to detail a magical world sufficiently that it will anticipate what players will actually try to do within it, in order to make the game work you have either provide some sort of default scenario for GMs to fall back on or you have to say 'f-it, everything is crazy' which tends to mean giving up and going down the method four path (Planescape does this, as do some other dimension-hopping type games) but this has storytelling.
We can see how the fallback method works best in the case of games that are set in the present day on Earth. The genius of Vampire: the Masquerade, for example, was the word 'masquerade' a plausible explanation for how you could have our world in the late 20th century + vampires (VtM has tons of problems, but the masquerade idea at the core is a solid one). In fantasy games like D&D the backdrop can't be the modern world, so instead the design simply turns the clock back 6-12 centuries to the Medieval Period and establishes that as the new default. That's a wildly imperfect method, since it doesn't properly consider the impacts of the supernatural on how development occurred, but it's a workable one. However, you can only do this in a Method One design. An inherently magical world will not produce a recognizably quasi-medieval world, instead it will produce something unique that is dependent upon its magical system. Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive is a useful example here, because he made a fairly determined effort to determine how his world would actually work and absolutely everything is different, down to the basic ecology.
So the difference between 'gained superpowers by just training really hard' versus 'gained superpowers by studying the secrets of sword BS' isn't just semantic, it reflects a fundamental difference in how the fantasy world functions.
I think we've both tried to explain these two things, in our own ways, multiple times, whenever this sort of topic comes up.
IMO, "guy at the gym" fallacy, both straight and inverse, is just a symptom of actual problems, not the core problem itself. And those problems are in the incoherent "have it all ways at once" worldbuilding, and in trying to cram multiple dissonant incompatible inspirations into a single game.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Was not expecting this many replies so soon, so I'm going to reply to various people in one post, as I wasn't sure how the forum looks on double/triple posting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
The Insanity
Link .
I read it before I decided to start this thread, noticed it hadn't been updated in a while so decided to start my own.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Drache64
That's a necro-thread He can't comment there. I also think he's better off creating a new thread with a solid premise that can inspire better discussion.
Hello, AntiAuthority!
Welcome to the play ground, great first post conversation!
I think you make a lot of solid points I will consider as a DM. I think this is not a system agnostic issue however, I think 5e makes things more grounded to an extent, whereas a Pathfinder/3.5 allow things to get a bit more out of control.
I would expect a 3.5/PF barbarian to reach demigod level feats, I would think a 5e Barbarian is more or less just a very skilled combatant with crazy resistance. Essentially street level Luke Cage vs Hulk.
Though I would like to add that I am currently playing a Caster Goliath with 14 STR and I get treated as much stronger than the Aaricokra (SP?) Paladin with an 16-18 in STR simply because I am a Goliath.
This is a fallacy I see many DMs do simply because I play a Goliath, they tend to favor them as strong imposing characters regardless of playstyle or stats.
Thank you for the welcome! And yeah, that doesn't sound fair, I rolled up a Half-Orc and got 18 in strength and would be annoyed if my Half-Orc with a higher strength was treated as weaker than someone with a lower score. And fair enough about Barbarians, but adding on Great Weapon Master helps with dealing a lot of damage, my DM has voiced frustrations that my character is too tanky to kill quickly and is doing a lot of damage... I almost killed a sphinx and he was frustrated because it wasn't supposed to be that easy for characters of our level to kill, and my character does it almost single handedly (though I did get two Nat 20s back to back, coupled with Great Weapon Master gave me another attack... Though I forgot to apply Savage Attack from being a Half-Orc).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Koo Rehtorb
People who object to the fact that D&D devolves into fantasy superheroes/anime bull**** would be better served by playing a different system that avoids that sort of thing. If you insist on playing D&D you ought to lean into the absurdities inherent to the system.
True, I really don't see how "normal guys" can survive against something like a Balor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
To Antiauthority: I think we are going to get along. This is well organized, well argued and well formatted. I think the scenario 1 & 3 are kind of the same but other than that this is a well polished essay. Admittedly I agree with everything I read in it so maybe I'm just biased. Also your name gives me hope.
I can kind of see what you mean, I was mostly just trying to cover the three parts of the fallacy I had an issue with... Normal guys should have died the second a dragon attacks them. And glad I inspired hope in someone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Son of A Lich!
I'd like to add that Vancian Spell Casting (Having spells "Prepared" that are fired off a finate amount of times in a day, typically) is a violation of Grod's Law - You can't and won't balance something by making it complicated to use.
When we get into the Quadratic caster problem, I usually say it's often unfair for later level play when some monsters are designed to have qualities that require (Or at least, are easily solvable by) spells slots being expended either in benefit of the Martial or that the Martial has X item that alleviates this. This creates a rift in teamwork, not encourages it. For example, Black Dragons usually live in Swamps and have wings. Monks are not natively proficient in ranged weapons aside from darts (and Javelins? I think? AFB right now, but I'm almost 100% sure they can't use Bow and arrows). If I don't have the Black Dragon in a cave (Which is an odd place to set up camp in a swamp), the Monk has to have a means of attacking at range or flight. Further, Black Dragons have acid breath and Monks have good Dex saves, but no native means of protecting themselves from said Acid damage. Further, Black Dragons have Spell casting and no native means of countering spells. So, the Casters in the party have to make some decisions on what is the best use of their actions to keep the Monk in the fight at all.
In other words, the Monk is actively weakening the greatest strength of the Casters abilities - they have to make sure he can participate in the fight in the first place by using their resources to enhance the Monk to their level.
If I were to drop something like a ring of flying prior to this encounter, the only reason the Monk needs it more then the Wizard or Cleric is that the Monk has no native means to fly... but if a wizard can cast a spell to allow him to fly, it allows the wizard to stay further out of harms way while the Monk would use it to get into harms way, by nature of being a Monk. Further, some of the few advantages Monks do have is in mobility which a ring of Flying would actively be a detriment to. Leap of the Clouds doesn't mean much if you can fly.
When playing with new players who don't have experience in D&D, and I tell them to play whatever class speaks to them, they usually steer away from spell casters because it's more complicated, but the Bards and Clerics/Druids and wizards that do play spell casters, they tend to get really frustrated when people start competing for magic items to let them step up to the spell casters level.
Either way, the magic items saves them a spell slot that don't have to cast anymore either on themselves or on their Mundane team mates, but more often then not, it makes it feel like a chore to make sure your team mates have the ability to do what the game is expected to have available to them. Resist elements, Magic attacks of some kind to get around resistances (Why do Rangers get one-uped by Wizards in Killing Werewolves!?), Elemental attacks to capitalize on weaknesses, a way to undo Debuffs used by your opponents, and so so many more examples that are just soaked into the bones of this system.
Not to mention straight up instances where Magic is the only means of overcoming a problem. A Barbarian isn't going to lift a block of stone or something to undo Petrification for example.
The argument that Wizards only have so many spell slots available and have to pick out their spells ahead of time is a red herring - Unless a wizard is very new to the system, they aren't going to prepare "Leomund's instant counting" as a first level spell slot when Shield is available to them. And if you ever have a spell prepared that you wish you didn't, just ignore it exists and don't prepare it again. Instead, prepare what you wish you did have prepared in that instance.
Then, the problem becomes constantly putting your party on a clock so that the limited spell slots becomes an issue... except it isn't, because if going in without spell slots is going to cause a defeat of the party (See above, with the black dragon example), then the party has the choice of almost automatically losing OR waiting until day break to get spell slots back and taking a half victory (Yes, the children were devoured by the hag, but the Hag has been slain so no more children will be eaten).
"But what if the Wizard doesn't have that spell prepared" is NOT a counter argument I listen too, anymore. I've run too many games where wizards are able to trivialize encounters single handily without going Nova. If they do go Nova, the party drops everything to take a long rest so he can be at full strength.
This is why I want to use M&M to play D&D from here on out.
I agree entirely, I don't like playing casters because of how complicated memorizing their spells can be. It gave me choice paralysis the first few times I tried playing them, as I was unsure of what type of spells to use.
And yes, a Monk would need a Wizard to remain relevant in a fight against a flying enemy like a dragon. The Monk isn't an equal, so much as someone the Wizard has to focus on keeping alive/useful during the fight while the Wizard figures out if sparing a few spells would be worth protecting their ally or not.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Part of the problem is the inverse guy in the gym fallacy -- the way some gamers insist that their martial characters who can do all these things and who are supposed to be balanced with high-level casters... are still utterly mundane and not "extra-normal" or superhuman or magical at all. That is, THEY insist that their martial character IS the "guy at the gym", and that this "guy at the gym" is able to take down epic wizards and demigods and ancient dragons.
I'd also add that this issue is NOT setting or system agnostic. It's a big problem in the D&D series of systems... much less of a problem or not a problem at all in other systems.
Yeah, I've seen posts where people try to claim their completely normal character is somehow surviving strikes from giant monsters and leaving because they don't want to play a superhuman character. Like I said, just play a low level PC or an NPC, that makes way more sense.
And if it's not system agnostic, should it be moved to another forum or is this one ok?
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
In D&D, 'magic' means drawing on some other force than just muscles and nerves. That force varies, ranging from hacking the code of reality (arcane magic), borrowing power from a divine entity (divine magic), channeling the power of the mind (psionics), and a whole bunch of other obscure forms including monk Ki and so on. D&D absolutely allows martials to acquire supernatural powers through various means, but just training your body is supposed to have limits roughly in the normal human zone.
Where is it stated that D&D martials have to have normal human limitations? Simply by leveling up and gaining feats, they're capable of doing a lot more damage than a real world human being can handle, along with enduring it.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
There is a justification for being a reality warper in D&D - there's actually several since there are various different methods for becoming one. There isn't one for training really hard to become superman. That doesn't necessarily mean there shouldn't be, just that there isn't in standard D&D. You can add a new one - Tome of Battle kind of does - and that's a perfectly acceptable approach.
Even without magical items, the characters are blatantly far beyond what anything a normal human being could achieve in real life though.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
There are literally hundreds of D&D novels, spread across several settings. We absolutely do know what sort of setting D&D/Pathfinder has in mind. It's not Lord of the Rings level, true, but it's nowhere near the level of power displayed by high Tier, high Optimization 3.X edition characters. The worlds that D&D wants to be (even though it fails to model them properly) restrict the presence of magic and with the exception of the highest reaches of the mighty still allow normal humans with normal human abilities to contribute.
I've never read any of the D&D novels myself, but this does bring up a question I had... Why can normal humans even be effective against high CR monsters? I don't mean in groups or anything, I mean 1v1.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
You're exaggerating here, a lot. First of all, many CR 4+ monsters aren't particularly physically strong at all. A CR 11 Hezrou only has a strength of 21, significantly weaker than a rhino, and people do survive getting hit and even gored by rhinos. With regard to fireball, explosions are funny and do weird things, besides, a fireball doesn't project any solid matter on its own, making actually less dangerous than your average grenade, which is by no means an instant kill to everyone in a room if you toss one in.
A fall into a pit trap might not be fatal, depending upon armor, how much force you fall with, how you hit, and a lot more.
These were more my imitations of DMs that believe that such things would realistically kill a normal human being, and if the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy were to be played completely straight, this is how a lot of DMs who believe in the fallacy could rule these situations while saying it's realistic. Not my own personal beliefs though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
People can and do kill very large animals in melee - humans have been killing elephants with spears since the stone tool era, large animals have large arteries and can be sliced and bled to death if you know what you're doing.
The thing is, I don't mean with a team or by catching an animal by surprise. Imagine you're given a sword and have to face off against a tiger that knows you're there and is ready to fight. It's not sick or old, it's in its prime and ready to fight. There's no room to maneuver around it to play to the environment or lay traps, it's just you vs this animal.
How many people do you think could 1v1 a large animal like this without getting seriously injured? And imagine they do this sort of thing on a daily basis, sometimes having to fight two or three such animals at a time. All by themselves and their own strength. That's what I mean.
But assuming you meant the giant monsters that probably tower over anything seen in the real world, like a Kaiju sized one... I seriously doubt a normal person could reliably hurt one of these things, especially enough to do a significant amount of damage to it in 6 seconds. It really is like what I said with the ant situation, could a tiny person with what amounts to a thumbtack be able to kill with it when they only come up to your toe? Maybe their ankle...
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
The existence of viable martial characters who are simply normal humans in a setting does not mean you can't have characters with supernatural powers and still have balance between the two groups. It just means there's a ceiling on how powerful those characters can be.
Why does there have to be a ceiling on how powerful these characters are? And how could these characters conceivably be useful in a situation against something many times more powerful than a normal human without instantly being killed?
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
This ceiling is dynamic and depends on how much technology the normal humans have access too. A world in which an infantryman walks around in powered Iron Man armor can have adventures alongside a wizard of far greater power than a guy with a steel sword and chain mail.
Why do martial characters need to be limited to technology? They have more hit points than some of the monsters they kill and can do more damage than monsters a lot stronger than them, so why?
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Mythological heroes violating the laws of physics absolutely counts as magic. Any violation of the laws of physics qualifies, for a sufficiently broad definition of magic. If you want to be super-generic you can call it 'phlebotinum-dependent' but it doesn't really matter. The fact that characters with superpowers can have different kinds of superpowers with completely different flavors, focuses, and justifications has nothing to do with the difference between characters who have superpowers and those who do not.
Not necessarily, I think the context of the world should be taken into consideration as well...
Otherwise, everything in sci-fi, can be called magic. Hercules lifting the sky is magic. Thor lifting the world serpent is magic. Superman shouldn't be able to fly because of yellow sunlight, so he's magic. Spider-Man got super powers instead of radiation poisoning, so he's magic. Bruce Banner gaining plenty of mass when he transforms violates physics, so the Hulk is magic too.
From Iron Man's technological weaponry, Green Lantern being able to use an alien ring to create light constructs, to Ben Tennyson's watch all violating what is physically possible in our world would count as magic even though they're technology based heroes.
Like how Ruby Rose from RWBY is a teenage girl who can wield a massive scythe while moving at incredible speeds and cut down swathes of large monsters with incredible precision. She's not magic (the show goes out of its way to establish her plainly physics breaking stunts aren't magic) and the physics of her universe seem to be similar to ours, but it's treated as being completely normal (not magical, just a product of her being exceptionally talented) within the context of her own universe.
Just because something doesn't obey the same laws as our world doesn't make it magic within the context of their own.
Otherwise, anything in any story, regardless of genre, from alien watches, to alien rings, psychic aliens that transcend space-time, radioactive dinosaurs, giant gorillas, shape shifting aliens, robots being sent backwards in time while wearing synthetic flesh and giant mecha, would count as magic since they can't exist according to the physics of our world. They violate the rules of our universe, yes, but they're treated as science or freaks of nature in their own.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Superhero settings - which is what you get if you give D&D martials power equal to the casters - have huge issues that rely on massive quantities of cognitive dissonance both to function and to avoid falling into their own grimdark pit. I suspect a lot of support for the 'inverse guy at the gym' including by many well known fantasy novelists, comes from this place.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
From past conversations, there's also the factor of "my heroes from fantasy were extraordinary men, but fundamentally human and not magic at all, who defeated sorcerers and warlocks through the strength of their arm and the wits of their head and the grit of their heart and the steel of their sword." They want to play Conan or the like, defeating the wicked diabolist or dark necromancer. If there's a wizard ally, they're like the wizard in the Conan movie. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's a huge part of the genre and can be a lot of fun... but D&D just is not the system for that campaign.
Yeah... I don't understand why people have to insist that their Level 20 character is just a normal guy. It's pretty jarring the more I read about it. Once again, I recommend they just play a low level NPC or something if they want to be that type of character.
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
You know I often joke that I have four definitions of the word magic. Today or yesterday I counted them and realized the list had grown to 5.
However here only two of them are important: the literary definition of magic which is what is impossible in real life but possible in the story and the thematic definition of magic covering hidden secrets, divine intervention and occult forces. Mythological heroes breaking our laws of physics is the former but may not be the second. Being stronger than a real human could be just because you trained hard (and maybe have good genes from a divine parent) isn't magic. There is no hidden secret... OK a kind of indirect divine intervention but definitely no occult forces. (And that isn't what I meant by divine intervention, if it was any setting created by gods would entirely be magic.)
So what I guess I am saying is "for a sufficiently broad definition of magic" is the problem because often in these discussions aren't using the broader definitions of magic, but a narrower one that has to do with the look and feel and not the mere plausibility of it all. Of course I don't know if AntiAuthority was using this meaning, but the post makes more sense if they were, so I figured they were. There is a The Giant quote about assumptions fitting the text that would go well here.
Pretty much, just look at it from the perspective of the story itself. It's impossible for something like Godzilla to exist in our world, but he's treated as a creature of science in his own, so his movie is considered sci-fi instead of fantasy.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Interesting stuff about being discordant and worldbuilding.
I really liked this one, in that I agree that the physical laws of the universe could be different... Though attaching the word magic makes me think of spell casting. Probably just a personal thing though. Different universes have different rules, and while it may appear magical to us, would probably just be something normal there.
Such as Ki in Dragon Ball being distinct from magic, while if you were to bring someone capable of using Ki to our world, they'd appear to be magic themselves.
Or Superman flying because yellow sunlight radiation shouldn't give him that power, but he'd seem to be magic to our perspective.
Or speedsters in comics violating every single law of physics but still not being considered magic.
If any of this seems confusing, let me know, I'm tired and probably shouldn't be typing so much late at night, but I saw some things I wanted to respond to so went for it.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Not necessarily, I think the context of the world should be taken into consideration as well...
Otherwise, everything in sci-fi, can be called magic. Hercules lifting the sky is magic. Thor lifting the world serpent is magic. Superman shouldn't be able to fly because of yellow sunlight, so he's magic. Spider-Man got super powers instead of radiation poisoning, so he's magic. Bruce Banner gaining plenty of mass when he transforms violates physics, so the Hulk is magic too.
From Iron Man's technological weaponry, Green Lantern being able to use an alien ring to create light constructs, to Ben Tennyson's watch all violating what is physically possible in our world would count as magic even though they're technology based heroes.
Yes, all physics-defying technologies in sci-fi can be called magic. They don't have to be, but that's an argument about semantics, not functionality. Everything in speculative fiction that involves clearly violating known physics can, and should, be grouped under a single umbrella at times when discussing design.
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Like how Ruby Rose from RWBY is a teenage girl who can wield a massive scythe while moving at incredible speeds and cut down swathes of large monsters with incredible precision. She's not magic (the show goes out of its way to establish her plainly physics breaking stunts aren't magic) and the physics of her universe seem to be similar to ours, but it's treated as being completely normal (not magical, just a product of her being exceptionally talented) within the context of her own universe.
The laws of physics in RWBY are clearly different from our own - otherwise ordinary humans can draw on their 'aura' to do any number of things that ordinary humans can't do, and the Grim violate all kinds of biological principles just by existing. RWBY is an example of a Method Three world from my post above - its a magical world with different physical laws from our own and it has powers within that world that violate those laws (which the characters refer to in-universe as magic). It's worth noting that RWBY has terrible world-building and cannot be utilized as a TTRPG setting without drastic modifications, as has been discussed on this forum.
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Just because something doesn't obey the same laws as our world doesn't make it magic within the context of their own.
Otherwise, anything in any story, regardless of genre, from alien watches, to alien rings, psychic aliens that transcend space-time, radioactive dinosaurs, giant gorillas, shape shifting aliens, robots being sent backwards in time while wearing synthetic flesh and giant mecha, would count as magic since they can't exist according to the physics of our world. They violate the rules of our universe, yes, but they're treated as science or freaks of nature in their own.
Yes, you can have a world with alternative physics. Those exist. And while D&D probably qualifies (since it includes supposedly natural creatures that can't stand up under their own weight, among other things), it plays extremely coy with this in most settings because once you admit your world is a magical world the typical quasi-medieval setting framework breaks down. All of the 'standard' D&D settings (Greyhawk, FR, Eberron, Mystara, even Ravenloft to a degree) go to considerable effort to pretend that the laws of physics are normal and that everything else, including something as basic as giants, are exceptions. Only Planescape freely admits to the insane incoherence at the heart of D&D, but there are limits on the kinds of stories Planescape can effectively tell as a result.
Worlds with alternative physics are hard to do in tabletop, because you cannot rely on the wide range of tools to deceive, hide, obscure, trick, and outright ignore the issues that arise from such worlds in narrative fiction. The laws of physics of the real world are robust, and everyone at a table has an intuitive understand of what is and is not possible (yes, some GMs can be overly restrictive and others overly permissible in this regard but everyone is at least on the same page). In the case of magical worlds with alternate physics its likely that no one - including the original creator (it is the rare author who's an actual theoretical physicist, that list is pretty much limited to Greg Egan) - really has a good grasp on what's going on. If you read shared world fiction, for instance, it quickly becomes clear that different authors place the limits of various phenomena in wildly different places (use of the Force in Star Wars is a good example. In The Force Unleashed the Apprentice pulls a Star Destroyer out of orbit, something that probably made Lucas swear violently the first time someone told him about it).
Magical worlds are wide open to bizarre exploitation. In the case of D&D a notable option is the necropunk world. Undead violate the conservation of energy, and as a result can be used to create what is essentially a totally free robot labor force. Doing such a thing is perfectly permissible under the rules, but it destroys the world as a viable gameplay space.
Narrative fiction gets around this because the author controls all characters and simple arranges it so that nobody does that, but a game world can't be built that way. This is an extremely important design principle that divides the structure of narrative setup from game setup. In a narrative you can eliminate potential world breaking issues by through the simple justification that no one wants to do that. In a game, anything that characters can do must be assumed as something that they will do, and if it destroys the setting it must be made impossible to do.
DBZ is a very clear example here. In DBZ every major PC or NPC analogue can destroy the Earth - and consequently end the series and slaughter most of the core cast - at any time. However, Toriyama controls the characters and they just don't do that. Except, one time a character - Freiza - showed up and didn't respect everyone else's norms and he did blow up the Earth. That meant Toriyama had to utilize a brand-new deus ex machina (literally described as a 'do-over') to prevent the entire setting from imploding.
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Pretty much, just look at it from the perspective of the story itself. It's impossible for something like Godzilla to exist in our world, but he's treated as a creature of science in his own, so his movie is considered sci-fi instead of fantasy.
You're positing a divide that doesn't exist. Science fiction includes fantastical and blatantly impossible things all the time, only the hardest of hard sci-fi forbids them. The difference between fantasy and science fiction involves story structure and theme, not plot or setting elements.
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I really liked this one, in that I agree that the physical laws of the universe could be different... Though attaching the word magic makes me think of spell casting. Probably just a personal thing though. Different universes have different rules, and while it may appear magical to us, would probably just be something normal there.
Such as Ki in Dragon Ball being distinct from magic, while if you were to bring someone capable of using Ki to our world, they'd appear to be magic themselves.
Or Superman flying because yellow sunlight radiation shouldn't give him that power, but he'd seem to be magic to our perspective.
Or speedsters in comics violating every single law of physics but still not being considered magic.
The best umbrella term is probably Phlebotinum which broadly refers to any story element that is not explicable and whose explanation doesn't really matter. TV Tropes uses this term extensively. If any phenomenon that violates the laws of the universe in which it appears, irrespective of the in-universe explanation, can be considered phlebotinum. To some extent this can even be extended to things that actually exist, but which are used in an absurd way for the purpose of furthering the plot - nanotechnology being a common offender in this regard.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mechalich
Yes, all physics-defying technologies in sci-fi can be called magic. They don't have to be, but that's an argument about semantics, not functionality. Everything in speculative fiction that involves clearly violating known physics can, and should, be grouped under a single umbrella at times when discussing design.
Not really. its frustrating and confusing more than anything to do this than not. different things have different reasons WHY they violate this or that and therefore I can't call them the same things. every time people insist upon it, they oversimplifying it and ignoring important things of why they are designed differently from other things within it.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
I'd also add that this issue is NOT setting or system agnostic. It's a big problem in the D&D series of systems... much less of a problem or not a problem at all in other systems.
I really don't know how excatly this a D&D specific problem, seeing that D&D (at least 3.5) supports a wide range of warrior-type characters, none of which are limited by "realism".
You can see this by the examples the OP mentioned: ALL of them are actually possible for a D&D martial character.
This is a DM/player problem.
Regarding the "Guy-at-the-Gym"-fallacy: Somehow this problem (and many, many others) simply vanished due to me an my players not being teenagers anymore.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Zombimode
I really don't know how excatly this a D&D specific problem, seeing that D&D (at least 3.5) supports a wide range of warrior-type characters, none of which are limited by "realism".
The Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are all explicitly non-magical classes and are all in Core. They are all also completely incapable of keeping pace with caster classes (something true of partial casters such as Paladins and Rangers as well, to a less extreme degree). At any level above 10 these classes have no chance whatsoever to compete with properly built counterparts from the caster classes and begin to lose contribution capability as early as level 6. While the power of high-level fighters certainly exceeds human norms in a small number of limited ways (moderately superhuman endurance, the ability to large creatures in unreasonable ways), they have no unique access to any such abilities (any skill-based ability to beat human limits is also available to experts, an NPC class), and they capacity is dwarfed by that of high-level full casters. A single 20th level wizard, reasonably but not ridiculously optimized, can slaughter a literally infinite number of equally constructed 20th level fighters given a modicum of prep time. To even contribute minimally at high level martial classes, including rangers and paladins, must rely on magical equipment they are incapable of producing.
The simple fact is that the power ceiling for martial characters and caster characters is in nowhere near the same place. This is extremely obvious in D&D fiction, simply compare the exploits of the the best known martial - Drizzt Do'urden - with those of the best known caster - Elminster. Place side by side, its difficult to reconcile their worlds as the same, and elminster is extremely un-optimized for a wizard (even by 2e standards, seriously).
"Guy at the Gym" thought processes absolutely contributes to this disparity. There is considerable resistance to elevating martials to the power level necessary to compete with casters. The backlash to Tome of Battle, 3.5's best attempt to do so, was substantial. Heck there are still those who contend that the Monk class 'doesn't belong' in D&D, an opinion that is only of limited consequence because the Monk is weak. And then there's 5e, which took the step of imposing an artificial ceiling on power overall, bounded accuracy, and included certain caster-specific nerfs rather than boost martials.
There are very reasonable world-building reasons to maintain 'guy at the gym' limitations in a setting. Those limits need no apply to any PCs - in a superhero setting they almost certainly would not - but they apply to the masses. If they don't your world is an explicitly magical world with all the complications that entails (as an aside, many settings are Earth+weirdness designs, and for those to work the masses absolutely must be bounded by existing physics). Most D&D settings explicitly reject that, leaving them a nonsensical mess.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Raziere
Not really. its frustrating and confusing more than anything to do this than not. different things have different reasons WHY they violate this or that and therefore I can't call them the same things. every time people insist upon it, they oversimplifying it and ignoring important things of why they are designed differently from other things within it.
Kitchen sinking a setting so that there are myriad different sources of power to break the laws of physics is generally a bad thing. D&D having divine magic and arcane magic and nature magic and bardic magic and psionics and demon pacting and truenaming and ki power and etc, etc. is terrible design. Even if the power of different characters takes different forms its better that all their powers should derive from the same metaphysical well (or perhaps two opposed ones).
Regardless, from the perspective of the 'guy at the gym' you can either break the laws of physics or you can't, and this either something everyone can do or something only special people can do. Whether or not a character can be viable in a system without breaking the laws of physics is much more important than how they break them.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Koo Rehtorb
People who object to the fact that D&D devolves into fantasy superheroes/anime bull**** would be better served by playing a different system that avoids that sort of thing. If you insist on playing D&D you ought to lean into the absurdities inherent to the system.
Or they can stick to E6. You can run E6 with still the pretense that martials are peak humans and casters are limited enough that they can't be demigods
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
It's always difficult to discuss this sort of thing, basically because it's all based on assumptions. Both IRL assumptions, and RPG assumptions.
How hot is a fireball? Apparently, we all assume it basically burns any living thing to a dry, blackened crisp. But why is that so, when we know perfectly well that it's clearly survivable? An extraordinarily lucky commoner can survive a low level fireball. It requires a save, and a crappy damage roll, but it's survivable.
At the same time, what limits do we impose on the 'guy at the gym'? I'm one guy at one gym, and no one would mistake me for an olympic contender, but a guy once tried to punch me in the face, and I caught his fist in my hand* - a trope often seen in movies, and one not generally expected in real life. With sufficient timing, a guy with a sword can fight a tiger and win. Tigers aren't made of some sort of blade proof material, and if he does it just right, the 'guy at the gym' could cut the tigers throat, midleap, and suffer not a scratch.
I saw an interview with a guy who leapt from a plane at 6000 feet, and his parachute didn't open. He fell 6000 feet, fell flat on the ground, and survived. When his mates (whose parachutes did open) landed and ran to him, he stood up. He fell back down again, because his leg was broken, but not only did he survive - he was relatively ok, all things considered.
If you watched Band of Brothers, you saw Sgt. Winters run straight through a german occupied village to communicate with allies on the other side - then back again. While I remain somewhat hesitant, I've read that account at least twice before, in WWII historical literature. Was he super humanly fast? No. And that's not the point.
The point is heroics. Surviving by the slimmest margin, just because. We're not playing 'the guy at the gym'. We're playing Conan, or Ethan Hawke, or Sgt. Winters. Real world limitations do not apply, not because of physics, but because of story.
Can you survive jumping off a building? Yes. Of course you can. It's no fun if the story is you jumped off a building and died. It's fun if you jumped off, broke your ankle, limped off, and killed another 7 enemies with your teeth and bare hands.
*We were both sufficiently surprised by this that the ensuing fight never happened.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by Kaptin Keen
I saw an interview with a guy who leapt from a plane at 6000 feet, and his parachute didn't open. He fell 6000 feet, fell flat on the ground, and survived. When his mates (whose parachutes did open) landed and ran to him, he stood up. He fell back down again, because his leg was broken, but not only did he survive - he was relatively ok, all things considered.
There's a difference been improbable and impossible. You can build up improbable coincidences one after another if you want without ever hitting on a strictly impossible act. This tends to become rather ridiculous after a point of course, but it is a line that can be towed. John Wick, for example, pulls off all sorts of extremely stylized stunts that are full of one highly dubious maneuver after another, but at the same time, never quite crosses into the blatantly impossible. He may suffer remarkably little inconvenience from having bullets strike his body armor, for example, but bullets don't bounce of his skin, and if he does get hit, he bleeds. The entire magical system of Mage: the Ascension was built around exactly this sort of hair splitting, and if you want to give non-empowered characters this kind of potency as a way of keeping up with those powered-by-phlebotinum you absolutely can.
In D&D, however, and especially in D&D 3.X, the gap is simply far too wide to bridge in this way. The rogue and the barbarian arguably do get 'action hero' type powers in evasion, rage, and some other tricks. That puts them above the fighter, but it doesn't make them competitive at higher levels.
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The point is heroics. Surviving by the slimmest margin, just because. We're not playing 'the guy at the gym'. We're playing Conan, or Ethan Hawke, or Sgt. Winters. Real world limitations do not apply, not because of physics, but because of story.
This is illustrative of an extremely important point with regards to narrative fiction versus games. 'Because of story' is a perfectly acceptable excuse in a narrative, it is not acceptable in game rules because the game is being defined by multiple people at once and may present an impossible to resolve disagreement (if you can play freeform games without the use of rules, good for you, but the entire point of having rules is to provide a dispute resolution mechanism). If you want 'because of story' to be a meaningful function in a game context you have to represent it mechanically. Many games do this, usually through the use of some form of metagame currency that allows players to shift probability curves and make what would have been incredibly unlikely nearly certain. That is certainly an option, one that may or may not be accommodated by an in-universe explanation (Star Wars, for example, has one behind its Force Points).
However, and I mentioned this above, your story will have all sorts of non-special people in it who don't get any benefit from metagame currency. John Wick shoots ~80 people in the head in his first film outing, those unfortunate mob flunkies aren't benefiting from his ability to bend probability and if they tried to pull the stunts he did would fail miserably. You have to consider how the rules represent those people.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
The thing is, its the broader definition that matters, not the look and the feel.
You have outlined why the broader definition is also important. But nothing you have said forbids the thematic definition from being important as well. In fact that is my stance, they are both important. I don't have time to go into lots of detail, but the first bit of evidence is pretty simple. Why are people using the word magic to mean that thing? Its because that is in fact the difference they are trying to talk about.
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So the difference between 'gained superpowers by just training really hard' versus 'gained superpowers by studying the secrets of sword BS' isn't just semantic, it reflects a fundamental difference in how the fantasy world functions.
Why can't training really hard (possibly have an talent for it, cap it off with some practical experience) be enough? I grant you the Olympics in such a world be pretty extreme compared to ours, but it is a different world, so why not?
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Was not expecting this many replies so soon, so I'm going to reply to various people in one post, as I wasn't sure how the forum looks on double/triple posting.
Welcome to the Playground.
Also I think the forum rules discourage but do not forbid chain posting, there is a green box near the top of the index pages with a link.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
Why can't training really hard (possibly have an talent for it, cap it off with some practical experience) be enough? I grant you the Olympics in such a world be pretty extreme compared to ours, but it is a different world, so why not?
Because to say that an ability or level of ability is achievable via "an Olympic degree of training" is to say that vast numbers of people are able to reach that level or near that level.
Only one person holds the Olympic or World record for an event at any one time, but there are many thousands of high school and college athletes who come within percentage points of that record time or height or weight or distance every year. (Compare the world records to the US high school records for any track and field event.) There are about 1800 people who play in the NFL in any given season, but there are orders of magnitude more who are almost good enough, or good enough but didn't get a break, or good enough but got injured, or good enough but didn't like it enough, or... Same with other sports.
The notion of the "elite athlete" as somehow vastly better than everyone else involved in the sport/competition, rather than simply one end of a distribution curve, is a complete myth -- even the "all time greats". The nature of the competitions and the sports media's obsession with "star power" grossly exaggerate the gap between "the greats" and "the guy who played 5 years as a backup".
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Kaptin Keen
With sufficient timing, a guy with a sword can fight a tiger and win. Tigers aren't made of some sort of blade proof material, and if he does it just right, the 'guy at the gym' could cut the tigers throat, midleap, and suffer not a scratch.
I saw an interview with a guy who leapt from a plane at 6000 feet, and his parachute didn't open. He fell 6000 feet, fell flat on the ground, and survived. When his mates (whose parachutes did open) landed and ran to him, he stood up. He fell back down again, because his leg was broken, but not only did he survive - he was relatively ok, all things considered.
If you watched Band of Brothers, you saw Sgt. Winters run straight through a german occupied village to communicate with allies on the other side - then back again. While I remain somewhat hesitant, I've read that account at least twice before, in WWII historical literature. Was he super humanly fast? No. And that's not the point.
We're not playing 'the guy at the gym'. We're playing Conan, or Ethan Hawke, or Sgt. Winters. Real world limitations do not apply, not because of physics, but because of story.
The idea for D&D is that a high level fighter should be able to do all of those things multiple times a day (or several days in a row) and walk away from it EVERY TIME. The reason we remember that skydiver, or SGT Winters, is because they did something completely abnormal. And while such things would be abnormal for a LVL 1 commoner, they should be par for the course for a LVL 20 Fighter.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
In general, whenever something like this comes up in my games, I just declare the martials to be using magic as well. High level D&D is high fantasy, magic is everywhere. Even when you don't have explicitly magical beings like elves who can just cast spells as a racial ability, by the time youre operating at that level, there is nothing remotely interesting that's entirely non-magical. Even regular animals get magical "dire" versions just to keep them relevant pretty quickly. Getting to high level means magic has infused your being, making you explicitly superhuman. Rogues can create pockets around them where the fireball doesn't hit. Fighters can get smacked in the face with a giant sword and only need to pause to spit out a tooth. They aren't casting spells or channeling an aura or whatever, its just a fundamental part of their being, like a dwarf's ability to see in the dark.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
John Wick, for example, pulls off all sorts of extremely stylized stunts that are full of one highly dubious maneuver after another, but at the same time, never quite crosses into the blatantly impossible. He may suffer remarkably little inconvenience from having bullets strike his body armor, for example, but bullets don't bounce of his skin, and if he does get hit, he bleeds.
I think this is both the best counter to the "fallacy" and the best way to interpret things.
I play a lot of Fate, where a "hit" is pretty explicitly not a "hit". So I tend to think of rules producing constraints on narration.
So if a crossbow does 1d6 damage (I forget), and a specific warrior has 40 hit points, that doesn't mean he can get hit with a crossbow roughly ten times and go walking around like a porcupine. It means that he didn't get hit. Maybe he dodged the shooter at the last second. Maybe the bolt grazed him. Maybe he dove out of the way a bit and scuffed his knee. Maybe it deflected off of his armor, leaving a bruise. I don't know.
But people don't get hit in the face with a crossbow bolt and live, so if he didn't die, he didn't actually take a strong shot.
Yes, this means that you can't actually "hit" someone with a crossbow on your first shot, no matter how lucky. I'm okay with this, as it makes for better gameplay. YMMV.
The corollary to this is that if you do something where the outcome is certain, then don't involve the dice. 1 in a million chances aside, falling from an airplane is this.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
It Reduces Levels to Completely Arbitrary Numbers.
This one in particular is really disturbing. A Level 20 character is expected to be able to face off against things that would be considered far beyond the reach of an ordinary human being… By saying “Levels don’t matter” it removes the entire concept of even having levels at all. If a Level 20 Fighter can be beaten by a Level 10 Wizard, the concept of Levels don’t mean anything in regards to martial classes.
Wow. What a first post. How many times did you memorize "Wall of Text" today? Because that's impressive.
One thing that really struck me was this bit. Level 10 Paper covers level 20 Rock is not inherently a problem, so long as you accept that style, and there's also level 5 Scissors that can cut that level 10 Paper. Bonus points if there's also Spock and Lizard.
There are things that might matter. Things related to balance of contribution in encounters you face, for insurance. So, if all encounters are Scissors, who cares if Paper beats Rock?
In other words, this little bit could easily be a thread all on its own.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Zombimode
I really don't know how excatly this a D&D specific problem, seeing that D&D (at least 3.5) supports a wide range of warrior-type characters, none of which are limited by "realism".
It's going to be a D&D-specific problem simply because D&D is the spot where most people have issues with the caster-martial divide. Outside of the basic issue that there are simply some problems that the guy who can break 'the rules' can solve that anyone with even superheroic normal abilities can't solve (planar travel, anything from Marvel that you need Dr. Strange or Professor X that Hulk/Thor/Wolverine simply can't address), D&D also has had a history of making the spellcasters 'strictly better' even at problems not in the category of 'only they could solve.' There are a huge number of caveats, particularly if you cut across all editions, but it is definitely where a lot of people have come upon the situation to the level that it becomes a gripe-worthy situation.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
The "Guy at the gym fallacy" is mostly a gross oversimplification of the fundamental incongruence in D&D's world-building and its interaction with the rules that people above me have described in greater detail (not that I agree about everything there, but that's neither the time nor place). And the general flailing about when it comes to portraying any of the powers at work.
It's not a uniquely D&D problem, perhaps, but D&D is the only franchise that has incredibly powerful spell-casters, non-casters that are supposedly able to work in the same party as said casters and a setting where mundane kings and dukes run things with their mundane armies of people with spears and swords. Superhero settings, as mentioned, are probably the closest analogue, funnily enough.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Willie the Duck
It's going to be a D&D-specific problem simply because D&D is the spot where most people have issues with the caster-martial divide. Outside of the basic issue that there are simply some problems that the guy who can break 'the rules' can solve that anyone with even superheroic normal abilities can't solve (planar travel, anything from Marvel that you need Dr. Strange or Professor X that Hulk/Thor/Wolverine simply can't address), D&D also has had a history of making the spellcasters 'strictly better' even at problems not in the category of 'only they could solve.' There are a huge number of caveats, particularly if you cut across all editions, but it is definitely where a lot of people have come upon the situation to the level that it becomes a gripe-worthy situation.
There's also the simple fact that many systems don't have the very steep power scale that D&D characters go through as they "progress".
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
There's also the simple fact that many systems don't have the very steep power scale that D&D characters go through as they "progress".
And many systems do not allow the trivial use of high-powered magic in the way that D&D 3.x does.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
kyoryu
And many systems do not allow the trivial use of high-powered magic in the way that D&D 3.x does.
D&D's casual use of powerful magic is very much an exception, rather than the norm. Even when you compare it to systems where super-powerful magic is the point... though, honestly, D&D is also partly such a system, at least on high levels.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
@Mechalich:
You say a lot of things I cannot disagree with. However - this bit:
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
'Because of story' is a perfectly acceptable excuse in a narrative
This I can disagree with.
My games are a narrative. It's a child of many fathers - but it's still a narrative. I take responsibility for making it an interesting narrative for all involved (and .. mostly succesfully, I hope), and if I need to chuck the rules out the window to make it work, then out the window they go.
Though, I have to confess I simply do not play high level. And in the context of this discussion, I realise that's cheating: I avoid the problem, rather than solve it. Or ... solve it by avoiding it. Whatever.
But the point stands: A fighter in my games will be able to do incredible things. Kill dozens of enemies, survive incredible amounts of damage, basically be Conan - or John Wick, if you like. Of course, the same is true for a wizard. They just require less axl grease to work.
The only problem is that often, players don't realise. They don't try outrageous stuff because the rules say they can't. It's propably unfair to blame them, but on the other hand, I don't want to tell them they can't, because, well, throw all restraint aside and the game becomes just .. stupid.
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Originally Posted by
Kesnit
The idea for D&D is that a high level fighter should be able to do all of those things multiple times a day (or several days in a row) and walk away from it EVERY TIME. The reason we remember that skydiver, or SGT Winters, is because they did something completely abnormal. And while such things would be abnormal for a LVL 1 commoner, they should be par for the course for a LVL 20 Fighter.
Yes - that's what I'm saying.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
take also into account that a high level fighter is using magical equipment to do superhuman stuff. his belt make him over twice as strong, his bracelets make him much harder, all that kind of stuff. what can be done by a high level martial without any equipment is quite underwhelming, short of high op
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
King of Nowhere
take also into account that a high level fighter is using magical equipment to do superhuman stuff. his belt make him over twice as strong, his bracelets make him much harder, all that kind of stuff. what can be done by a high level martial without any equipment is quite underwhelming, short of high op
Therein certainly lies a disconnect. Fighters and the like never were truly mundane, as even before the WBL days of 3e, a bit part of a fighter's power level was that most of the magic item treasure table was geared towards them (and, particularly with intelligent swords with X/day spell powers, often made them 'spellcasters through another avenue').
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Also keep in mind that the "guy at the gym" is... just that. Probably a level 1 commoner type, with a decently high (14-16) strength.
That's not a benchmark to use for a highly trained warrior.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
kyoryu
Also keep in mind that the "guy at the gym" is... just that. Probably a level 1 commoner type, with a decently high (14-16) strength.
That's not a benchmark to use for a highly trained warrior.
I think you are missing the point of the topic. There's no actual gym, or guy at one. The OP laid out the concept in the first post-- "The Guy At The Gym Fallacy in a nutshell: Mundane/martial characters should be limited to the limits of what is possible in our world. Magic is exempt from this same logic." If the highly trained warrior is limited to what is possible in our world, then they are constrained by TGATG thinking, regardless of whether they are at the level, or above the level, of a level 1 commoner with 14-16 Strength.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
To the OP:
A lot of your post boils down to the D&D HP system being an incoherent mess. This isnt exactly news, and I wouldnt use the D&D HP system to try and draw any conclusions about the game world.
You have a succinct definition of the "guy at the gym" fallacy, I have never seen one before and have even started threads trying to find it. The post that coined the term is less of a fallacy and more of a meandering rant, mostly against strawmen.
Some people like playing Lord of the Rings / Conan, others like playing fantasy superheroes. The problem is that 3.5 tries to be everything at the same time and fails. I personally prefer Dragonlance, and dont have a problem with the feel of any edition of D&D except third.
High level martials have a ton of magic items in D&D. This means that most of your examples will never actually come up in play and are mostly just hypothetical talking points. Also, 3E casting is so broken that super powers ain't going to help martials keep up.
Also, you keep talking about people "playing NPCs," isn't that a contradiction?
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Also, you keep talking about people "playing NPCs," isn't that a contradiction?
I wish it were a contradiction. But at least in the way I use the phrase, I've seen it happen more often than I'd like.
What I mean by it is, "for this setting and campaign, the character you are trying to play is an NPC" -- it can range from Mr I Want To Stay Home And Bake, who never, even over a long campaign, develops a motivation to adventure of any kind, and still has to be dragged along... to Mr I'm Deliberately Constructed Poorly, who for example needs a certain Skill to use his Power, but refuses to invest in that Skill "because it would violate the character concept"... to Mr Slice of Villager Life who wants to RP villager interactions and tasks all day and never do anything risky or adventurous... to Mr But This Character Type Is In All The Fiction I Love, I Don't Care If It's Always A Side Character.
And it's usually the same player repeatedly.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
This thread started with a long, serious, well-written explanation for why the original poster prefers to play a certain way. There's is nothing wrong with either the description or the logic.
The only problem comes in when somebody starts to believe that "How I prefer to play" is the same thing as "How everybody should prefer to play".
I agree with his statement that Fighters (or at least Fighters who don't have a reasonable complement of high-level magic items. or a relevant Prestige Class) have far less raw power than casters at 20th level. This is certainly a problem with playing at that level, but it doesn't crack the list of top five reasons I don't like playing at that level.
What some people call "The Guy at the Gym Fallacy" isn't a fallacy; it's simply one way to design a fantasy RPG. And it's the way I prefer.
I don't want to play a party that can attack all of Sauron's armies at once and win. I want to play a group of nine adventurers who often hide from large groups of goblins, run from a Balrog, and are trying to accomplish a covert mission without being seen.
I don't want to play a musketeer who could defeat all of Richelieu's guards and all of the Huguenot army; I want to play musketeers who make a name for themselves by winning a 4 vs. 5 melee, and then again by holding a bastion for a single hour.
I don't want to play a group that can defeat Darth Vader and the entire empire in a straight-up battle; I want to play the intrepid heroes who heroically face long odds trying to slip in and sabotage its greatest weapon.
In short, I want to act heroically, which means taking risks to defeat enemies with greater power than my group has.
The high-level problem isn't that Fighters don't become Great Powers beyond humanity; it's that casters do. And the solution was built into original D&D: when the PCs become powerful enough that roaming the wilderness isn't risky, then settle down, build a keep, and face armies with your armies. [Or just retire the characters. I'll be retiring my 14th level Fighter/Ranger/Horizon Walker after next Saturday's game.]
I'm not trying to tell you to play my way. Play the game you love the way you love to play it.
I'm telling you that I will play the game I love the way I love it -- even if my tastes are different from yours.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
I think a concise way to sum it up is that: yes, there exists a problematic assumption that non-casters need to be restricted to realistic human capabilities. But it's just a case of people being wrong and stubborn; D&D has never done a very good job properly portraying their intended power level. Or... power level in general.
Mind you, it sure would help if people arguing for realism knew what realism is, which is often not the case.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
You have outlined why the broader definition is also important. But nothing you have said forbids the thematic definition from being important as well. In fact that is my stance, they are both important. I don't have time to go into lots of detail, but [now I do!]
OK so I have sorted me head a bit more and so yes, from a world building perspective the literary definition of magic is more important. But there is more to this problem than world building, notably character aesthetics (maybe I should call it the aesthetic definition of magic instead of the thematic definition).
In that a warrior feels different from a spell-caster. Regardless of power-level they are very different archetypes and if anyone has a counter argument to that I will hear it. And people want to play characters from both of those (and many others and their more narrow subsets), even if it is impossible.
Punching though a brick wall is impossible. But it feels a lot more like a warrior than chanting and having it crumple or turning into a ghost form and walking through it. Wall runs, jumping onto a nearby roof or snatching an arrow out of the air, for a fit and agile acrobat why not? Its better than spider climb, a short range teleport or a force-field.
There are people stick "because its magic" in the background because that makes them more comfortable than "because its cool", but as long as you maintain that feel (which plastering the world magic around isn't going to help but it shouldn't break it) then it doesn't really matter. How they got that so-called-magic and how they can use it is usually much more important to that feel than whether we could do it or not.
And that is why I believe the thematic/aesthetic definition of magic is also important in these conversations.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
Why can't training really hard (possibly have an talent for it, cap it off with some practical experience) be enough? I grant you the Olympics in such a world be pretty extreme compared to ours, but it is a different world, so why not?
Because to say that an ability or level of ability is achievable via "an Olympic degree of training" is to say that vast numbers of people are able to reach that level or near that level.
Yes, which is why the Olympics are extreme and not just one person taking gold again and again. Drop down the proportion because most people are still farmers and don't have time to do that without starving. I have left behind the idea the PCs are the only ones above "level 0" in so many works that finding another reason to do it. On the other hand...
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The notion of the "elite athlete" as somehow vastly better than everyone else involved in the sport/competition, rather than simply one end of a distribution curve, is a complete myth -- even the "all time greats".
Magic is also a myth. And I think sports culture is doing a enough to present that myth I'm not worried about perpetuating in my work. Especially when it presented in the same light as the unbelievable ones. So really I don't understand the issue.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
OK so I have sorted me head a bit more and so yes, from a world building perspective the literary definition of magic is more important. But there is more to this problem than world building, notably character aesthetics (maybe I should call it the aesthetic definition of magic instead of the thematic definition).
In that a warrior feels different from a spell-caster. Regardless of power-level they are very different archetypes and if anyone has a counter argument to that I will hear it. And people want to play characters from both of those (and many others and their more narrow subsets), even if it is impossible.
Punching though a brick wall is impossible. But it feels a lot more like a warrior than chanting and having it crumple or turning into a ghost form and walking through it. Wall runs, jumping onto a nearby roof or snatching an arrow out of the air, for a fit and agile acrobat why not? Its better than spider climb, a short range teleport or a force-field.
There are people stick "because its magic" in the background because that makes them more comfortable than "because its cool", but as long as you maintain that feel (which plastering the world magic around isn't going to help but it shouldn't break it) then it doesn't really matter. How they got that so-called-magic and how they can use it is usually much more important to that feel than whether we could do it or not.
And that is why I believe the thematic/aesthetic definition of magic is also important in these conversations.
Personally I've never had much use for "because it's cool" -- it's an open-ended standard that ends up excusing everything and anything, the core of the kitchen-sink problem. And one root of D&D's problem of trying to be a lot of incompatible things at once.
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
Yes, which is why the Olympics are extreme and not just one person taking gold again and again. Drop down the proportion because most people are still farmers and don't have time to do that without starving. I have left behind the idea the PCs are the only ones above "level 0" in so many works that finding another reason to do it. On the other hand...
In the modern world, most people are doing something else and don't have the time and resources to train to an Olympic contention level -- but a lot of people have time while still in high school or college to reach 90% of an Olympic level. On the other hand, most people aren't doing physical labor for 8+ hours a day, either, so there's a tradeoff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
Magic is also a myth. And I think sports culture is doing a enough to present that myth I'm not worried about perpetuating in my work. Especially when it presented in the same light as the unbelievable ones. So really I don't understand the issue.
I know it's not a popular stance, but I'm firmly of the opinion that anything that can be done "just by training" implies things about the entire setting, not just a handful of PCs and other exceptions, that if the body of a human in a particular setting can be trained to extreme degree X, then there will be many more people who can at least train to extreme degree 0.9X, and many many more people to degree 0.8X, and so on, that a distribution curve is inevitable based on whatever the nature of the human body is in that setting. If someone can train to leap over 20' walls and deadlift multiple tons, then that says things about the human body that are different than in our world.
BUT, I'm also not at all bothered by the idea that it's possible to do something besides or in addition to physical training, that takes the character into "extra-normal" territory, which is "magic" under that very broad definition that was mentioned earlier.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jay R
This thread started with a long, serious, well-written explanation for why the original poster prefers to play a certain way. There's is nothing wrong with either the description or the logic.
The only problem comes in when somebody starts to believe that "How I prefer to play" is the same thing as "How everybody should prefer to play".
I agree with his statement that Fighters (or at least Fighters who don't have a reasonable complement of high-level magic items. or a relevant Prestige Class) have far less raw power than casters at 20th level. This is certainly a problem with playing at that level, but it doesn't crack the list of top five reasons I don't like playing at that level.
What some people call "The Guy at the Gym Fallacy" isn't a fallacy; it's simply one way to design a fantasy RPG. And it's the way I prefer.
I don't want to play a party that can attack all of Sauron's armies at once and win. I want to play a group of nine adventurers who often hide from large groups of goblins, run from a Balrog, and are trying to accomplish a covert mission without being seen.
I don't want to play a musketeer who could defeat all of Richelieu's guards and all of the Huguenot army; I want to play musketeers who make a name for themselves by winning a 4 vs. 5 melee, and then again by holding a bastion for a single hour.
I don't want to play a group that can defeat Darth Vader and the entire empire in a straight-up battle; I want to play the intrepid heroes who heroically face long odds trying to slip in and sabotage its greatest weapon.
In short, I want to act heroically, which means taking risks to defeat enemies with greater power than my group has.
The high-level problem isn't that Fighters don't become Great Powers beyond humanity; it's that casters do. And the solution was built into original D&D: when the PCs become powerful enough that roaming the wilderness isn't risky, then settle down, build a keep, and face armies with your armies. [Or just retire the characters. I'll be retiring my 14th level Fighter/Ranger/Horizon Walker after next Saturday's game.]
I'm not trying to tell you to play my way. Play the game you love the way you love to play it.
I'm telling you that I will play the game I love the way I love it -- even if my tastes are different from yours.
You're not really describing higher-level D&D, then, unless you ban spellcasting past a certain (and quite low) point.
And "GATGF" isn't simply about the overall power level, it's about a disparity in the standards for what can be accomplish by a "martial" character vs a "spellcasting" character within D&D.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jay R
The only problem comes in when somebody starts to believe that "How I prefer to play" is the same thing as "How everybody should prefer to play".
You are right but isn't that just a power level thing? Like do you want the martials to be hiding while the wizard destroys the army? I suppose you could but it feels odd.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Personally I've never had much use for "because it's cool" -- it's an open-ended standard that ends up excusing everything and anything, the core of the kitchen-sink problem.
Funnily enough that's the same issue I have when "because it's magic" gets out of hand. So I agree, this is another way that they are similar. I think the solution though is to pick a particular type of cool/magic you are going for in a particular setting and sticking to it. And some times that cool/magic involves super-human feats with little additional explanation.
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I know it's not a popular stance, but I'm firmly of the opinion that anything that can be done "just by training" implies things about the entire setting, not just a handful of PCs and other exceptions, [...]
Also agreed, but I have three general solutions:- Just ignore that implication as part of the premise. This is the most common solution, its crude but it can work.
- Add a little bit extra (you did mention this but I have some stuff to say too). For instance I never said "just by training" (I think, if I did I misspoke) I mentioned training, aptitude and experience. The aptitude could just be an extension/exaggeration of the normal curve but cuts it down a bit. The experience then lets us focus in on the adventurers, as most stories with this sort of thing do.
- Embrace it. Possibly the rarest solution but I've done it and it really sends waves out into world building.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Koo Rehtorb
People who object to the fact that D&D devolves into fantasy superheroes/anime bull**** would be better served by playing a different system that avoids that sort of thing. If you insist on playing D&D you ought to lean into the absurdities inherent to the system.
I agree with this. There are so many RPGs that have less fantastic implications where supernatural physicans/high magic is less common. It's not the right game if you can't accept this.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Kaptin Keen
It's always difficult to discuss this sort of thing, basically because it's all based on assumptions. Both IRL assumptions, and RPG assumptions.
Fair enough.
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At the same time, what limits do we impose on the 'guy at the gym'? I'm one guy at one gym, and no one would mistake me for an olympic contender, but a guy once tried to punch me in the face, and I caught his fist in my hand* - a trope often seen in movies, and one not generally expected in real life. With sufficient timing, a guy with a sword can fight a tiger and win. Tigers aren't made of some sort of blade proof material, and if he does it just right, the 'guy at the gym' could cut the tigers throat, midleap, and suffer not a scratch.
Yeah, it is possible to kill a tiger with sufficient training and a weapon. The Maasai tribe would hunt lions as a rite of passage too. Gladiators would also be forced to fight against predatory animals.
The thing is, imagine them doing this within the span of 6 seconds. Then they do it again to the next tiger. And again. They're one shotting these animals as easily as you or I would kill an ant or rodent. They're just hitting it hard enough to kill it, though I suppose you could argue it's represented as an attack against a vital area, though that's what I considered crits to be... Either way, imagine a guy at the gym doing this daily, or even several times in one day and completely curbstomping the tiger.
Also, consider the tiger is probably going to be scratching at this person and there's a chance they'd die in this encounter. A normal human could beat these things, but I severely doubt it would be over in what's basically the blink of an eye, and the character could also just as easily kill 2 or 3 other lions with ease.
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I saw an interview with a guy who leapt from a plane at 6000 feet, and his parachute didn't open. He fell 6000 feet, fell flat on the ground, and survived. When his mates (whose parachutes did open) landed and ran to him, he stood up. He fell back down again, because his leg was broken, but not only did he survive - he was relatively ok, all things considered.
Pretty much, only the person who did this didn't get up and essentially walk it off. Then he could go and do the same thing again and again just for fun.
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If you watched Band of Brothers, you saw Sgt. Winters run straight through a german occupied village to communicate with allies on the other side - then back again. While I remain somewhat hesitant, I've read that account at least twice before, in WWII historical literature. Was he super humanly fast? No. And that's not the point.
Yeah, weird things can happen in real life. Like I mentioned above, a viking is rumored to have killed 100 men before dying.
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The point is heroics. Surviving by the slimmest margin, just because. We're not playing 'the guy at the gym'. We're playing Conan, or Ethan Hawke, or Sgt. Winters. Real world limitations do not apply, not because of physics, but because of story.
Slightly off topic, I have the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, was Conan blatantly superhuman in these stories too? I've heard Comic!Conan is more powerful, but I really don't know too much about the character at the moment.
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Can you survive jumping off a building? Yes. Of course you can. It's no fun if the story is you jumped off a building and died. It's fun if you jumped off, broke your ankle, limped off, and killed another 7 enemies with your teeth and bare hands.
If a Level 20 character broke their ankle after jumping off a building, I have to wonder how they'd survive getting hit by something like a Stone Giant.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
There's a difference been improbable and impossible. You can build up improbable coincidences one after another if you want without ever hitting on a strictly impossible act. This tends to become rather ridiculous after a point of course, but it is a line that can be towed. John Wick, for example, pulls off all sorts of extremely stylized stunts that are full of one highly dubious maneuver after another, but at the same time, never quite crosses into the blatantly impossible. He may suffer remarkably little inconvenience from having bullets strike his body armor, for example, but bullets don't bounce of his skin, and if he does get hit, he bleeds. The entire magical system of Mage: the Ascension was built around exactly this sort of hair splitting, and if you want to give non-empowered characters this kind of potency as a way of keeping up with those powered-by-phlebotinum you absolutely can.
Never seen the John Wick movies myself, but I know a little about them... And about body armor being why he's not dead and also representing his HP... I think it falls under AC, or possibly Damage Reduction? It's hitting him, so it's beating his AC, but the Damage Reduction is stopping the bullet from killing him, though it would do some (possibly negligible) HP damage from the force of the bullet.
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Because to say that an ability or level of ability is achievable via "an Olympic degree of training" is to say that vast numbers of people are able to reach that level or near that level.
Only one person holds the Olympic or World record for an event at any one time, but there are many thousands of high school and college athletes who come within percentage points of that record time or height or weight or distance every year. (Compare the world records to the US high school records for any track and field event.) There are about 1800 people who play in the NFL in any given season, but there are orders of magnitude more who are almost good enough, or good enough but didn't get a break, or good enough but got injured, or good enough but didn't like it enough, or... Same with other sports.
The notion of the "elite athlete" as somehow vastly better than everyone else involved in the sport/competition, rather than simply one end of a distribution curve, is a complete myth -- even the "all time greats". The nature of the competitions and the sports media's obsession with "star power" grossly exaggerate the gap between "the greats" and "the guy who played 5 years as a backup".
Well, something I think should be considered about issues training hard enough to become superhuman.
A lot of people have social lives outside of training, might be injured, could be forced to stop due to other commitments or just not have interest in doing such things. Couple this with the very real possibility that a lot of them would die if they had a random encounter with something of a much higher CR than they can take, and... Yeah.
Also, this might sound like a broken record, but why isn't training really hard an ok answer, but studying (training your brain essentially) enough to become able to alter reality is?
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
To the OP:
A lot of your post boils down to the D&D HP system being an incoherent mess. This isnt exactly news, and I wouldnt use the D&D HP system to try and draw any conclusions about the game world.
Fair enough, but then you run into problems with how characters are surviving encounters against otherworldly monsters and not being killed.
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You have a succinct definition of the "guy at the gym" fallacy, I have never seen one before and have even started threads trying to find it. The post that coined the term is less of a fallacy and more of a meandering rant, mostly against strawmen.
Thank you!
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Some people like playing Lord of the Rings / Conan, others like playing fantasy superheroes. The problem is that 3.5 tries to be everything at the same time and fails. I personally prefer Dragonlance, and dont have a problem with the feel of any edition of D&D except third.
To each their own.
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High level martials have a ton of magic items in D&D. This means that most of your examples will never actually come up in play and are mostly just hypothetical talking points. Also, 3E casting is so broken that super powers ain't going to help martials keep up.
I'd have to disagree with you on giving martials super powers not being a way to help martials. To me, if a Wizard goes from essentially a new student at Hogswarts to becoming able to create personalized dimensions/stop time/fly/transform into other animals... Why can't my Fighter split a mountain or outrun thoughts? But this is just my interpretation on what would work... Those are types of characters I'd expect to be facing off against things that can just teleport around or laugh while pelting the equally leveled martial with ranged attacks from the sky.
And which of my examples are hypothetical?
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Also, you keep talking about people "playing NPCs," isn't that a contradiction?
Actually, there are NPC classes in 3.5E, while in 5E they aren't labeled as such but they have the same names as they did in 3.5E. They're not super powerful heroes, they're just background characters that represent real life people like you or me.
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Originally Posted by
Jay R
This thread started with a long, serious, well-written explanation for why the original poster prefers to play a certain way. There's is nothing wrong with either the description or the logic.
Thank you, I put a lot of effort into the OP.
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The only problem comes in when somebody starts to believe that "How I prefer to play" is the same thing as "How everybody should prefer to play".
I wasn't really trying to tell anyone how to play, more pointing out the flaws in how a Level 20 character isn't just a guy who is still within the realms of reality.
Closest example I could think of is a player insisting their Level 20 Wizard is really only as powerful as David Copperfield, instead of being more like a comic book superhero.
The best way to represent characters that are prevalent in fantasy stories where the warriors are just humans is with low levels, otherwise you can run into a Level 20 Wizard trying to act like they're Dumbledore when they're much more powerful. If this makes sense.
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I don't want to play a party that can attack all of Sauron's armies at once and win. I want to play a group of nine adventurers who often hide from large groups of goblins, run from a Balrog, and are trying to accomplish a covert mission without being seen.
That's not really what I'm saying. A Level 20 character would probably have broken the Balrog in half, as it appeared to be just a big, fiery monster in the movie. Why would such a character hide from Sauron's armies? A Level 6 character, I can see, not a Level 20 one.
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I don't want to play a musketeer who could defeat all of Richelieu's guards and all of the Huguenot army; I want to play musketeers who make a name for themselves by winning a 4 vs. 5 melee, and then again by holding a bastion for a single hour.
A Level 20 character wouldn't be struggling against normal characters. What you're describing sounds more in line with a lower level character.
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I don't want to play a group that can defeat Darth Vader and the entire empire in a straight-up battle; I want to play the intrepid heroes who heroically face long odds trying to slip in and sabotage its greatest weapon.
It still sounds like you want to play a low level character fighting against higher level characters. I don't see what the issue is, but when a character is high level, they're anything but someone that would struggle in this sort of situation.
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In short, I want to act heroically, which means taking risks to defeat enemies with greater power than my group has.
This is pretty much saying you want to play a low level character who faces off against higher level/higher CR character. I don't see the conflict in this.
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The high-level problem isn't that Fighters don't become Great Powers beyond humanity; it's that casters do. And the solution was built into original D&D: when the PCs become powerful enough that roaming the wilderness isn't risky, then settle down, build a keep, and face armies with your armies. [Or just retire the characters. I'll be retiring my 14th level Fighter/Ranger/Horizon Walker after next Saturday's game.]
I think I understand, and agree casters are incredibly powerful... I think it would be great if martials got to be on a comparable level of power. But if we bring the power of casters down, then we have this weird question of why these people aren't instantly destroyed when they try to fight against something that's a threat to entire planes of existence.
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I'm not trying to tell you to play my way. Play the game you love the way you love to play it.
I'm telling you that I will play the game I love the way I love it -- even if my tastes are different from yours.
Same, I'm not trying to force my opinion onto what type of game you should play, but I was mostly pointing out how a lot of low level campaigns/characters that you seem to be interested in shouldn't try to masquerade a high level character as a normal person, as it can cause a lot of dissonance with the power levels. A Level 3 character hiding from the armies of Sauron is perfectly understandable, a Level 20 character that could, through numbers alone, instantly kill just about anything in Sauron's army... Not so much.
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Originally Posted by
Willie the Duck
I think you are missing the point of the topic. There's no actual gym, or guy at one. The OP laid out the concept in the first post-- "The Guy At The Gym Fallacy in a nutshell: Mundane/martial characters should be limited to the limits of what is possible in our world. Magic is exempt from this same logic." If the highly trained warrior is limited to what is possible in our world, then they are constrained by TGATG thinking, regardless of whether they are at the level, or above the level, of a level 1 commoner with 14-16 Strength.
Actually, I think (could be wrong) you, kyoryu and I are all on the same page. He's agreeing that a normal person (such as a gym rat) with an NPC class wouldn't be comparable to a high level warrior with stats befitting a hero. That's how I read it anyway.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Thank you!
Not sure that I meant it as a compliment :smalleek: but, you're welcome.
I don't think there is actually a universally accepted definition of GATGF, so you might run into a lot of people who disagree with yours.
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
FI'd have to disagree with you on giving martials super powers not being a way to help martials. To me, if a Wizard goes from essentially a new student at Hogswarts to becoming able to create personalized dimensions/stop time/fly/transform into other animals... Why can't my Fighter split a mountain or outrun thoughts? But this is just my interpretation on what would work... Those are types of characters I'd expect to be facing off against things that can just teleport around or laugh while pelting the equally leveled martial with ranged attacks from the sky.
Sure, more power helps them be better, but they already have super-powers in the form of magic items. And while I don't know what "outrun thoughts" actually means, stuff like splitting mountains and leaping tall buildings and outrunning locomotives and stuff won't help one bit to keep up with 3.5 wizards who are astrally projected from slowed time demiplanes with an infinitely expandiny army of gated arch-angels while polymorphed into something that can cast XP free wish every round. All the while you are stuck in a force cage, because those don't allow a save and don't care how strong or fast you are, if you can't teleport or disintegrate you just can't get out.
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
And which of my examples are hypothetical?
Well, for example, most fighters will have magical and / or adamant swords and belts of giant strength at high level, so I can't imagine a DM arguing that they just can't cut through a door.
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Actually, there are NPC classes in 3.5E, while in 5E they aren't labeled as such but they have the same names as they did in 3.5E. They're not super powerful heroes, they're just background characters that represent real life people like you or me.
But those classes still get the same outrageous HP and BaB scaling as every other class. The difference between a fighter and warrior is literally just 1hp per level, tower shield proficiency and 10 bonus feats.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Well, something I think should be considered about issues training hard enough to become superhuman.
A lot of people have social lives outside of training, might be injured, could be forced to stop due to other commitments or just not have interest in doing such things. Couple this with the very real possibility that a lot of them would die if they had a random encounter with something of a much higher CR than they can take, and... Yeah.
Also, this might sound like a broken record, but why isn't training really hard an ok answer, but studying (training your brain essentially) enough to become able to alter reality is?
Honestly, I don't think either one is OK, and that "just training to human max" isn't enough to get magic, either -- at some point, the character has to either be born with, be given, or unlock/seize something extra that goes beyond just "working out his brain meats".
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Sure, more power helps them be better, but they already have super-powers in the form of magic items. And while I don't know what "outrun thoughts" actually means, stuff like splitting mountains and leaping tall buildings and outrunning locomotives and stuff won't help one bit to keep up with 3.5 wizards who are astrally projected from slowed time demiplanes with an infinitely expandiny army of gated arch-angels while polymorphed into something that can cast XP free wish every round. All the while you are stuck in a force cage, because those don't allow a save and don't care how strong or fast you are, if you can't teleport or disintegrate you just can't get out.
About the outrunning thoughts part, it's based on Norse Mythology where a man (I thin he was just a normal man) was able to somewhat keep pace with (but still lost to) the embodiment of thought itself.
And while those things wouldn't be able to allow a character to defeat a character who can just teleport away... I'd say allow this character to be able to tear open portals into the Wizard's realm. Maybe the ability to No Sell magic or even turn it off temporarily. As just a start.
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Well, for example, most fighters will have magical and / or adamant swords and belts of giant strength at high level, so I can't imagine a DM arguing that they just can't cut through a door.
Fair enough, but it's not impossible for a player to either have their magic weapon stolen or destroyed (such as by a rust monster).
And even without magic, a character in 3.5E (with Vital Strike and Power Attack) or in 5e (Great Weapon Master) can do massive amounts of damage. They can do enough damage to kill giant monsters, but not enough to get through a metal door...?
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But those classes still get the same outrageous HP and BaB scaling as every other class. The difference between a fighter and warrior is literally just 1hp per level, tower shield proficiency and 10 bonus feats.
It's sort of bad when an NPC class is almost as powerful as a PC class. It makes Fighters seem like glorified NPCs. Then again, I've often heard Fighters are pretty bland as other PC classes can outdo them at well... Fighting.
In a way, it feels like the system itself is unsure of whether high level characters are superhuman or just normal people.
But I also meant from a story perspective. It feels like a high level martial PC is essentially an NPC in the story of the super powered caster. They're not as powerful, can't do as many tricks or anything unique, they almost feel like a sidekick or a pack mule if you were to watch or read in the form of a story.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
There's also the simple fact that many systems don't have the very steep power scale that D&D characters go through as they "progress".
Or if they do they own it a bit more. I'm not going to call Scion a well designed game, because White Wolf can't do mechanics, but nobody goes into it under the impression they're playing ordinary people or that there won't be ridiculous apotheosis shenanigans.
D&D in particular is in an unusual place for a few reasons. Part of it is that it's most everyone's first system, so there's a habit of defaulting to it where it doesn't work well that tends not to exist for other systems (a few generics can see this, but said generics also tend to have a wider range). Part of it is that there's so much in the game that creates an extremely specific setting, but also a fair amount of text that presents it as a generic fantasy setting.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Well, something I think should be considered about issues training hard enough to become superhuman.
A lot of people have social lives outside of training, might be injured, could be forced to stop due to other commitments or just not have interest in doing such things. Couple this with the very real possibility that a lot of them would die if they had a random encounter with something of a much higher CR than they can take, and... Yeah.
There's still the proportionality issue.
Let me throw out an example. I'll use distance running, since it recently made the news in a big way. The current marathon record is now just under 2 hours - by one of the best runners of the post-industrial era with a precision targeted training regimen, advanced technological support, and copious amounts of assistance from others during the event itself. However, running hobbyists train for marathons all the time, and it's quite common for such a person to complete a marathon in around 3.5 hours (an 8-minute-per-mile pace). For men competing in the Boston marathon this year the average finish time was under 3.5 hours for all age categories below 55 - a group thousands strong. Framed this was, a hobbyist with a modest amount of training in their off time can complete the race in only 175% of the time needed by the very best in the world under ideal conditions.
Now, imagine a world in which people can train to run with superhuman speed and endurance. In this scenario Eliud Kipchoge is still the best in the world, because he's got tons of natural talent and he trains relentlessly for marathons with a laser focus. to make the record obvious, let's increase his capabilities by a full order of magnitude and have him go ten times faster. Now he completes his record setting marathon not in just under 120 minutes, but in just under 12 - he's running at 130 miles and hour! If we assume proportionality of results to training, then a hobbyist marathoner can still complete the 26 mile run in 175% of the time, or 21 minutes, meaning they run at 74 miles an hour, faster than a cheetah and over far more distance than the cat can sustain.
Congratulations, now you have a world in which people who train modestly by running every day and putting in a hard run on the weekends can run around faster than you can legally drive on most highways. The resulting world is nothing like Earth. It's a magical world and you have to completely rebuild human civilization to account for this capability.
Now, you can indeed avoid all this by discarding proportionality. Well, you say, only the truly committed elite get access to "special" training regimes that allow them to unlock abilities levels far beyond the human norm. That's fine, you can certainly do that, but once you do, it's just superpowers all over again, there's just a 'you must train this fanatically to ride this ride' gatekeeper (which has consequences of its own, since it means everyone with powers will be desperate, fanatical, or both).
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Also, this might sound like a broken record, but why isn't training really hard an ok answer, but studying (training your brain essentially) enough to become able to alter reality is?
Well, first of all, a huge number of settings, and even some D&D classes, don't allow studying to do that. Many, such as Star Wars or the Wheel of Time, explicitly require that those who master the mystic arts have some sort of inborn trait that normal people just don't get. Even when this isn't explicit it is often implied that learning to become a wizard requires some sort of 'special nature' that ordinary people don't have.
Beyond that, even if the mastery of magic is purely based on studying esoteric knowledge, it has the advantage that there's no baseline and therefore proportionality can be ignored. All human beings can run, so training to have superhuman running speed means a distribution curve with every other human on it somewhere. Humans don't have a natural ability to cast spells, which means you can arbitrarily anchor the distribution curve wherever you want. This means you can position it so that only the 1% of the most talented have any magical ability at all and that no matter how hard the hobbyists train they won't get anywhere.
Now, it is absolutely true that D&D does not do this. D&D says anyone with Int 10+ or Wis 10+ or Cha 10+ can learn to cast spells, which as a practical matter is a stupidly massive portion of the population. This is in fact a massive problem for D&D, which has both too much magic and magic that is way too powerful. Consequently the actual D&D rules - most extremely in 3.X but for other editions too - don't produce anything like the quasi-medieval backdrop presented in setting books and fiction with the possible exception of Dark Sun (which, huh, has special rules that limit magic). Overt permissiveness of magical use is an issue, especially for worldbuilding. Outright magic worlds where literally everyone in the population has magical powers to some degree - I mentioned the Codex Alera up-thread, it's a nice, popular example, tend to have cataclysmic verisimilitude issues.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Well, we seem to have run into the classic D&D problem: it is an ultra Roll-play power fantasy where there is zero narrative consistency. In a system like that, you kind of expect balance in a way you wouldn’t for a Role-play system.
But it is a festering pile of dung at actually balancing any of it, meaning that in the power fantasy, several classes are fundamentally weaksauce and completely run over.
If it were a system about stories as opposed to “Mighty and Mightier”, that might not matter. But it’s not; it’s a system about how strong you can get while being uber.
If it were a system where certain niches were important because not everything could be solved through punching (not literally), maybe other classes would matter. But everything can be solved through punching, and casters have the strongest arms (again, not literally).
So what do you do with a crap system? Don’t play it. Go find any one of dozens of well regarded systems and play them instead. We live well beyond the days of yore where the hobby was two guys in a dorm with a monster manual. I guarantee that if there is a style you want to play, there probably a mechanically sound and community vetted system that will put the D&D on the back burner. If you’re lucky, you’ll spark interest from the rest of your table as well and never need to D&D again.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Yeah, it is possible to kill a tiger with sufficient training and a weapon. The Maasai tribe would hunt lions as a rite of passage too. Gladiators would also be forced to fight against predatory animals.
The thing is, imagine them doing this within the span of 6 seconds. Then they do it again to the next tiger. And again. They're one shotting these animals as easily as you or I would kill an ant or rodent. They're just hitting it hard enough to kill it, though I suppose you could argue it's represented as an attack against a vital area, though that's what I considered crits to be... Either way, imagine a guy at the gym doing this daily, or even several times in one day and completely curbstomping the tiger.
Also, consider the tiger is probably going to be scratching at this person and there's a chance they'd die in this encounter. A normal human could beat these things, but I severely doubt it would be over in what's basically the blink of an eye, and the character could also just as easily kill 2 or 3 other lions with ease.
If it isn't over in the blink of an eye, the human isn't going to win. Humans cannot fight tigers, that's simply not doable. But humans can do things tigers can't, most notably think. So the human knows what the tiger is going to do: It's going to leap for the throat, because that's how tigers kill. Human waits, human times his strike perfectly, human wins.
In principle, a sufficiently trained and experienced human could do this over and over again.
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Pretty much, only the person who did this didn't get up and essentially walk it off. Then he could go and do the same thing again and again just for fun.
What a boring story that would be. If a character decided to jump off things all the time just because he thought he could, I'd let him die. But if he does it once or twice because that's the ... let's say heroic ... thing to do, then I'll ro
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
Yeah, weird things can happen in real life. Like I mentioned above, a viking is rumored to have killed 100 men before dying.
Yes. That's my point, not yours. I'm the one arguing that the outer limits of what's humanly possible are much wider than you allow for.
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
If a Level 20 character broke their ankle after jumping off a building, I have to wonder how they'd survive getting hit by something like a Stone Giant.
Depending on the hight of the building, I'd say jumping off is way more dangerous than getting hit by a giant. You can't deflect a 200' fall.
But that's so much not the point. If a human just stands there and let's a club that's basically the equivalent of a speeding car hit him square in the chest - he's dead, instantly.
But I hope that's not how you play the game.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
KineticDiplomat
So what do you do with a crap system? Don’t play it. Go find any one of dozens of well regarded systems and play them instead. We live well beyond the days of yore where the hobby was two guys in a dorm with a monster manual. I guarantee that if there is a style you want to play, there probably a mechanically sound and community vetted system that will put the D&D on the back burner. If you’re lucky, you’ll spark interest from the rest of your table as well and never need to D&D again.
Good luck finding a system without an explicit setting that also supports a zero-to-god power curve and also allows a multitude of concepts, usually not found together at any one point, to be realized.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
The resulting world is nothing like Earth. It's a magical world and you have to completely rebuild human civilization to account for this capability.
And the same is not true for magic? As far as I am concerned we are already on this path, why not go a little bit further.
Although if don't want to have things go that far, mess with the curve a bit. The best in the world goes up by 10 times but the hobbyist only say doubles. Not that has no effect but it keeps things from being quite as insane. Until you realize there are wizards everywhere.
To Ignimortis: Mutants & Masterminds fits that description. Legend also does but does have a default setting. Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. I don't know what sort of power curve GURPS has.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Kaptin Keen
If it isn't over in the blink of an eye, the human isn't going to win. Humans cannot fight tigers, that's simply not doable. But humans can do things tigers can't, most notably think. So the human knows what the tiger is going to do: It's going to leap for the throat, because that's how tigers kill. Human waits, human times his strike perfectly, human wins.
In principle, a sufficiently trained and experienced human could do this over and over again.
Ok, but what you said can apply to a low level character just as much as a high level one. Only thing is a high level Character could also be surrounded by 8 lions and still win within a few seconds.
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What a boring story that would be. If a character decided to jump off things all the time just because he thought he could, I'd let him die. But if he does it once or twice because that's the ... let's say heroic ... thing to do, then I'll ro
Ok, but let me try something to see if I can get the same feeling down.
"What a boring story that would be. If a character decided creating incinerating enemies all the time just because he thought he could, I'd let him fail. But if he does it once or twice because that's the ... let's say heroic ... thing to do, then I'll ro"
At that point, why even bother having rules for characters if you would just ignore them because you don't like them?
You could just as easily say, "Yeah, using magic here wouldn't be cool, so your spells don't work." Would a caster player enjoy being told that?
That'd be the same thing as the DM examples I used above ignoring things in the rules because the DM doesn't believe in such things. How is that any different?
I addressed this already in the OP with, "Hit Points Are An Abstraction of Damage" and "It Reduces Levels to Completely Arbitrary Numbers."
Do you have anything to support your reasoning beyond you just wanting it to be that way because a normal person probably wouldn't survive throwing themselves off of extremely high places on a daily/hourly basis? If there's a reason, please tell me, otherwise you're subscribing to the "Guy At the Gym" fallacy.
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Yes. That's my point, not yours. I'm the one arguing that the outer limits of what's humanly possible are much wider than you allow for.
Yes, real world athletes can push the boundaries of what was considered impossible, like the logging challenge.
I'm agreeing with you here, I don't understand why you seem bothered by this?
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Depending on the hight of the building, I'd say jumping off is way more dangerous than getting hit by a giant. You can't deflect a 200' fall.
But that's so much not the point. If a human just stands there and let's a club that's basically the equivalent of a speeding car hit him square in the chest - he's dead, instantly.
But being able to deflect what amounts to a speeding car with a shield multiple times doesn't lead to the character having their arm broken? How much sense does that make?
I've addressed this in my OP, you're saying the same thing that I pointed out the flaws with already. What you're saying sounds a lot like those DMs in the hypothetical situations that I used in the OP.
I'm using numbers/feats/mechanics/the rules and you seem to be using the story by itself. Everything you said seems like you trying to fit high level characters into your preexisting ideas of what a low level character would look like, but still wanting to call it high level.
Kratos is a high (or possibly mid) level character (based on the types of monsters he kills), but you don't see people trying to force him to go on low level adventurers and be cautious of low level monsters.
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But I hope that's not how you play the game.
Why does it matter to you how I play my games?
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Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Honestly, I don't think either one is OK, and that "just training to human max" isn't enough to get magic, either -- at some point, the character has to either be born with, be given, or unlock/seize something extra that goes beyond just "working out his brain meats".
This sounds like a Willing Suspension of Disbelief issue, but I have different views on it than you.
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Originally Posted by
Mechalich
There's still the proportionality issue.
Let me throw out an example. I'll use distance running, since it recently made the news in a big way. The current marathon record is now just under 2 hours - by one of the best runners of the post-industrial era with a precision targeted training regimen, advanced technological support, and copious amounts of assistance from others during the event itself. However, running hobbyists train for marathons all the time, and it's quite common for such a person to complete a marathon in around 3.5 hours (an 8-minute-per-mile pace). For men competing in the Boston marathon this year the average finish time was under 3.5 hours for all age categories below 55 - a group thousands strong. Framed this was, a hobbyist with a modest amount of training in their off time can complete the race in only 175% of the time needed by the very best in the world under ideal conditions.
Now, imagine a world in which people can train to run with superhuman speed and endurance. In this scenario Eliud Kipchoge is still the best in the world, because he's got tons of natural talent and he trains relentlessly for marathons with a laser focus. to make the record obvious, let's increase his capabilities by a full order of magnitude and have him go ten times faster. Now he completes his record setting marathon not in just under 120 minutes, but in just under 12 - he's running at 130 miles and hour! If we assume proportionality of results to training, then a hobbyist marathoner can still complete the 26 mile run in 175% of the time, or 21 minutes, meaning they run at 74 miles an hour, faster than a cheetah and over far more distance than the cat can sustain.
Congratulations, now you have a world in which people who train modestly by running every day and putting in a hard run on the weekends can run around faster than you can legally drive on most highways. The resulting world is nothing like Earth. It's a magical world and you have to completely rebuild human civilization to account for this capability.
Now, you can indeed avoid all this by discarding proportionality. Well, you say, only the truly committed elite get access to "special" training regimes that allow them to unlock abilities levels far beyond the human norm. That's fine, you can certainly do that, but once you do, it's just superpowers all over again, there's just a 'you must train this fanatically to ride this ride' gatekeeper (which has consequences of its own, since it means everyone with powers will be desperate, fanatical, or both).
To be honest, I'm not sure how to respond to this. I have heard of such principles before (what with talent not being some ultra rare thing that only a few people possess), but I don't quite feel like I can give an accurate argument for or against it. My apologies.
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Well, first of all, a huge number of settings, and even some D&D classes, don't allow studying to do that. Many, such as Star Wars or the Wheel of Time, explicitly require that those who master the mystic arts have some sort of inborn trait that normal people just don't get. Even when this isn't explicit it is often implied that learning to become a wizard requires some sort of 'special nature' that ordinary people don't have.
Beyond that, even if the mastery of magic is purely based on studying esoteric knowledge, it has the advantage that there's no baseline and therefore proportionality can be ignored. All human beings can run, so training to have superhuman running speed means a distribution curve with every other human on it somewhere. Humans don't have a natural ability to cast spells, which means you can arbitrarily anchor the distribution curve wherever you want. This means you can position it so that only the 1% of the most talented have any magical ability at all and that no matter how hard the hobbyists train they won't get anywhere.
Now, it is absolutely true that D&D does not do this. D&D says anyone with Int 10+ or Wis 10+ or Cha 10+ can learn to cast spells, which as a practical matter is a stupidly massive portion of the population. This is in fact a massive problem for D&D, which has both too much magic and magic that is way too powerful. Consequently the actual D&D rules - most extremely in 3.X but for other editions too - don't produce anything like the quasi-medieval backdrop presented in setting books and fiction with the possible exception of Dark Sun (which, huh, has special rules that limit magic). Overt permissiveness of magical use is an issue, especially for worldbuilding. Outright magic worlds where literally everyone in the population has magical powers to some degree - I mentioned the Codex Alera up-thread, it's a nice, popular example, tend to have cataclysmic verisimilitude issues.
This sounds like a personal Willing Suspension of Disbelief going on here. I grew up with settings that encouraged hard work giving one super powers (Shonen manga), being incredibly smart allows you to use magic/be psychic (or they're that smart because they're able to use magic or are psychic...), and being able to be so charismatic that you can alter reality. This sounds like it varies depending on the person doing it.
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Originally Posted by
KineticDiplomat
So what do you do with a crap system? Don’t play it. Go find any one of dozens of well regarded systems and play them instead. We live well beyond the days of yore where the hobby was two guys in a dorm with a monster manual. I guarantee that if there is a style you want to play, there probably a mechanically sound and community vetted system that will put the D&D on the back burner. If you’re lucky, you’ll spark interest from the rest of your table as well and never need to D&D again.
You do have a point, but that could easily apply to anything anyone is critical of. At that point, why bother with constructive criticism? People (including me) criticize things because they want to see it improve. I put this up on a forum because I also wanted people to criticize my points so I could improve it by stamping out the flaws. Just saying, "Play another game" to me sounds like, "Don't try to fix or improve upon an already existing thing."
But still, at that point, what's the point of criticizing anything by that logic?
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
And the same is not true for magic? As far as I am concerned we are already on this path, why not go a little bit further.
Although if don't want to have things go that far, mess with the curve a bit. The best in the world goes up by 10 times but the hobbyist only say doubles. Not that has no effect but it keeps things from being quite as insane. Until you realize there are wizards everywhere.
Whether magic really changes things fundamentally depends on how accessible, common, and capable the magic is. Magic that just allows relatively minor boosts in efficacy, reliability, etc, to existing human capabilities (say, blessing of a fire or forge spirit making a forge maintain just the right temperature, but stillr requiring the smith to do the work) is meaningful, but doesn't radically alter the culture or society.
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Originally Posted by
Cluedrew
To Ignimortis: Mutants & Masterminds fits that description. Legend also does but does have a default setting. Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. I don't know what sort of power curve GURPS has.
GURPS and HERO have whatever power curve the GM decides on and the players agree to. The starting CP/XP, and the rate of gaining CP/XP, and the limits on attributes and skills and powers and such, are all "toolkit".
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Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
This sounds like a Willing Suspension of Disbelief issue, but I have different views on it than you.
See signature. :smile:
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AntiAuthority
At that point, why even bother having rules for characters if you would just ignore them because you don't like them?
You could just as easily say, "Yeah, using magic here wouldn't be cool, so your spells don't work." Would a caster player enjoy being told that?
That'd be the same thing as the DM examples I used above ignoring things in the rules because the DM doesn't believe in such things. How is that any different?
Conversely, if the rules always trump DM judgement, why even bother to have a DM?
If something, be it magic or mundane, doesn't make sense, I am going to step in.
Note that this almost never happens in actual play and is more about edge cases that usually only come up in discussions where people are trying to nitpick the rules, and if it does come up in actual play it is, in my experiance, almost certainly resulting from a caster trying to break the game rather than a artial just trying to get by.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Max_Killjoy
Whether magic really changes things fundamentally depends on how accessible, common, and capable the magic is. Magic that just allows relatively minor boosts in efficacy, reliability, etc, to existing human capabilities (say, blessing of a fire or forge spirit making a forge maintain just the right temperature, but stillr requiring the smith to do the work) is meaningful, but doesn't radically alter the culture or society.
In regards to world building, it's easier to just take a preexisting culture and throw in magic than building a civilization from the ground up with magic in mind.
But some simple questions come into play, like, "If magic is so overwhelmingly powerful, wouldn't natural selection make it so that plenty of people have magic?"
Along with, "Why haven't mages just taken over the world? There's always that one jerk that feels the world owes them, and they have the power to take whatever they want."
"Since these humans have often have fantastic origins, are they really normal people like us?"
"How would humans have even been able to survive long enough to begin building civilizations when a lot or passing monsters could have casually enslaved/killed the masses if they felt like it?"
Probably others I can't think of at the moment, lol.
I'm fine with a Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting.
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See signature. :smile:
I grew up watching Shonen anime, so... Mine is probably a lot different from someone who grew up 50 years ago only reading Conan and Cthulhu Mythos. It tends to vary from person to person.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Conversely, if the rules always trump DM judgement, why even bother to have a DM?
To have fun while telling a story using pre-existing (or modified) rules. I think the main job of a DM is to make sure everyone's having fun. Rules are there to help people have fun by letting them get creative with how they create their characters and test their abilities in the DM's world.
I doubt many people would find it fun if their DM just told them, "No, I don't care how minmaxed or specialized your character is, I'm not letting you do this thing." when they tried to do something they thought their characters should be able to do. Especially if it feels like the DM is ignoring a character that's well within the rules because the DM just doesn't like something their player is trying to do.
I've been that person and it felt like the DM was being vindictive, even if he just couldn't wrap his head around my character doing something that few regular people could survive.
Another player I know was noticeably disappointed when they tried something and the DM refused to let them do it because the DM didn't care about the rules, only about what a normal person could do.
I also read some threads on Reddit about similar occurrences.
But ultimately, I think the purpose of the DM is to make sure everyone's having fun, and to use the rules as a guide as to how to do that. Having a DM just pick and choose what doesn't work for them, even if you designed your character with this concept in mind, even if the rules say it's fine, doesn't sound fun to me. Especially if the DM also allows something else that's impossible (or just very unlikely) to happen, it'd feel like they were being arbitrary with their reasoning and there's no baseline except for what the DM was in the mood for at that point in time... At which point, why bother trying to do fantastic things since the DM could just ignore anything you do because, "I just don't like it"?
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If something, be it magic or mundane, doesn't make sense, I am going to step in.
I can respect this reasoning, but what makes sense to you might not make sense to someone else.
Take dragons for example, they should not be able to fly under their own power. Giants and titans probably also wouldn't make much sense, as their hearts would probably explode from how large they are.
A lot of monsters don't make sense, but I ignore that because it's a different world and a fantastic one. These are fantastic creatures that fantastic people are fighting against.
I think what does and doesn't make sense to us flew out the window as soon as using items and talking lets you create a fireball. Doesn't make sense to us... But these characters are fantastic ones, not realistic ones.
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Re: Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy
Re: criticism and other games. For the sake of brevity, I’ll keep this to a few main points:
1) Constructive criticism is a tool, and like all tools we measure it’s usefulness by how successfully it accomplishes/helps us accomplish the job.
2) The job you want done is to avoid martials being constrained to “realism” while magic gets “it can do whatever it wants”, and by extension avoid the martials-are-close-to-worthless-and-by-the-way-the-world-makes-no-sense thing.
3) What you don’t like is fundamentally built into the rules and mechanics of D&D, and is particularly exacerbated by the fact that D&D is first,foremost, and entirely about ubermensch fighting increasingly absurd enemies.
4) The community at large plays it the way it is written, to the point where I’ve literally seen posts on this board about how dumb some new guy was for not thinking up a soul based warlock healer and instead took “cleric” because he though the party needed a healer. Where you can find “tier” systems in signatures that relegate martials to being a joke class.
Conclusion: what you want is so fundamentally against the grain of what D&D and its players are that, as a tool, criticism is unlikely to change anything. There are times when it would be the tool to use, but not this time. This isn’t tweaking an understanding about an aspect of the game, it’s an attack on the very basis of the game. Changing your system will have far more effect, and far faster, than hoping one long essay on a fan board will.
Unless of course you take pleasure in arguing this sort of thing - and let’s admit it, if we didn’t, few people would post. In which case fire away. If you do, however, you may find that presenting other people with false dilemmas is somewhat sophomoric.