Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy

I just a thought, we seem to be talking a lot about whether it would be called magic or not, if this should be considered world building or not. But is there any actual disagreements, major statements about the guy at the gym fallacy? Or does anyone disagree with the following statement.

Regardless of a character's archetype or skill set, all characters and character abilities should be given the same standards of plausibility.

At least in broad strokes, I can think of one corner case where it doesn't apply (which is to say when the implausible powers are so weak normal abilities can over power them) and I'm sure particular setting concepts might want to go against this. But is there anyone who thinks that this is not a good guide line or starting point?

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Originally Posted by Cluedrew

I just a thought, we seem to be talking a lot about whether it would be called magic or not, if this should be considered world building or not. But is there any actual disagreements, major statements about the guy at the gym fallacy? Or does anyone disagree with the following statement.

Regardless of a character's archetype or skill set, all characters and character abilities should be given the same standards of plausibility.

At least in broad strokes, I can think of one corner case where it doesn't apply (which is to say when the implausible powers are so weak normal abilities can over power them) and I'm sure particular setting concepts might want to go against this. But is there anyone who thinks that this is not a good guide line or starting point?

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100% agreed.

I mostly started this thread to discuss why fantasy characters expected to fight against reality warping demi-gods shouldn't be held to the same standards of reality as our own, along with giving characters the same level of power regardless of class.

I want to hear what people think a character of this level concept should be capable of doing, not arguing over what does and doesn't count as magic or what sort of world could produce these beings. Like if a Caster gets to be Doctor Strange at X Level, let a Fighter be 616 Thor at the same level and let a Barbarian be 616 Hulk when put on the same scale.

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Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy

There is NO difference between the agreement to play in "a campaign in a setting where humans are largely like real world humans, unless they have some sort of magic (spellcasting or otherwise)" and the agreement to play in "a campaign about espionage in a gritty real-world-like setting".

There is NO difference between a player who demands to play a "not at all extranormal" martial character who still somehow can do things that are blatantly extranormal for people in that setting, and a character who wants to play their precious DBZ expy character in a gritty espionage game.

I've encountered that player -- as often as a fellow player as when I was the GM -- because there are too many players who don't read the setting materials, or who know what they're doing and think they can impose on the existing relationships and other peoples' desire to get along to get their way, or because they believe that their fun is simply more important than anyone else's.

But MOST gamers I've gamed with, I've never had this "but I wanted to play a space marine in your medieval setting" sort of silliness come up, because they want to make a character who fits the campaign.

And it's not "players who want to be wildly out of place", it's "players who want characters who are wildly out of place" -- though if someone can't tell the difference between those two statements, that would explain a lot about why they feel like their precious identity is threatened by not being allowed to play their DBZ expy in a heroic fantasy game, or feel like everyone else is just being big unimaginative meanies when they say "your space marine doesn't fit in the Forgotten Realms".

Which brings me back to this nonsense I'm seeing about "but it's FANTASY, that means I get to live out my FANTASY"... as with many of these discussions, that's two different usages of the same word being mashed together to win an argument. Just because the campaign takes place in a fantastic setting, of the sort that's often seen in the "fantasy" subgenre of speculative fiction, does not mean that it's a "fantasy" of the sort that implies anything the player can imagine is fair game and limits are somehow "infringing on their agency".

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you sound like your being very engative than all those people your being vitriolic about. you sound like a GM who will hammer down anything, who is angry their world isn't working like a clock and will attack any concept that is slightly creative for fear of being "not a fit". and your continued ranting hasn't been dissuading me of that. I know you think your not, but your not presenting yourself well herew.

and again it sounds like you don't like the kind of games that these concepts are supposed to be in. you keep bringing up these low-powered grit stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with a god-fighter and equaling a god wizard. you keep bringing up DBZ and hating it, maybe, you just like completely different games from what we're talking about and this not even your concern dude. I think you just don't like high-powered games all that much and guess what, this kind of thing isn't a concern at low-levels of DnD.

this balance concern? this desire to play super fighters you don't like? nothing to do with your low-powered fun, so if you really don't like people butting in with concepts that don't fit, take your own medicine and stop bringing up low-powered campaigns and preferences when talking about a high-powered problem. E6 is a thing after all.

Back on topic: For abilities that it is appropriate for a martial to have, well I've got a few major types and I'll give a few examples for each.

Technical - Based on control, refinement and execution: Cutting the wind (ranged attacks with melee weapon), aiming for the right places to disable an enemy, extra defences and reactions and various special techniques.

Strength - Raw power and toughness: Basic applications of strength like lifting might be underestimated (lots of supplies, moving things out of the way), throwing large objects is handy (as a siege weapon), the ability to stay rooted against immense force, shockwave attacks and of course wielding a really big weapon.

Agility - Speed and flexibility: Wall run and other acrobatics, stealth and sneaking, slight of hand tricks, accuracy, rate-of-fire and trick shots with ranged weapons (rate of attack with melee weapons attack), dodging and always going first.

Will/Emotion - Based on overriding the bodies normal limits: Super-states, continuing to fight unhindered by injury, sensing danger and resisting or ignoring magical effects.

Auxiliary Skills - Other non-magic abilities I think fit a "physical" or "worldly" character: Cooking so tasty it functions as healing potions, singing and preforming to inspire (as bard), camouflage, disguise, lying, construction of safe shelters, negotiation and bartering, crafting effectively magically items, leadership and communication.

Semi-Mystical - Magic but from a body based view point for characters close to the line: Enchant weapons and armour, identify spells and other magical effects, controlling spirit or ki, calling magical allies, disabling or negating magical effects with physical actions.

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Originally Posted by Lord Raziere

Too bad, you sound worse than all those people your being vitriolic about. you sound like a GM who will hammer down anything, who is angry their world isn't working like a clock and will attack any concept that is slightly creative for fear of being "not a fit". and your continued ranting hasn't been dissuading me of that.

and again it sounds like you don't like the kind of games that these concepts are supposed to be in. you keep bringing up these low-powered grit stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with a god-fighter and equaling a god wizard. you keep bringing up DBZ and hating it, maybe, you just like completely different games from what we're talking about and this not even your concern dude. I think you just don't like high-powered games allt hat much and guess what, this kind of thing isn't a concern at low-levels of DnD.

this balance concern? this desire to play super fighters you don't like? nothing to do with your low-powered fun, so if you really don't like people butting in with concepts that don't fit, take your own medicine and stop bringing up low-powered campaigns and preferences when talking about a high-powered problem. E6 is a thing after all.

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You're missing the point. It has nothing to do with "how dare you play a high powered character" - my words. What he's saying is if you're playing a high powered game it's not right for a player to bring in a low powered character and blame the game for not supporting it. That's the inverse. If you don't want to play Punching a hole in the universe to another plane Guy then don't, but when you're playing such a character, the Guy At The Gym, don't do it in the same game as a spellcaster who casts a spell that does create a hole in the universe leading to another plane of existence. If you do anyway, don't cry the spellcaster is too powerful.

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Originally Posted by Lord Raziere

Too bad, you sound worse than all those people your being vitriolic about. you sound like a GM who will hammer down anything, who is angry their world isn't working like a clock and will attack any concept that is slightly creative for fear of being "not a fit". and your continued ranting hasn't been dissuading me of that.

and again it sounds like you don't like the kind of games that these concepts are supposed to be in. you keep bringing up these low-powered grit stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with a god-fighter and equaling a god wizard. you keep bringing up DBZ and hating it, maybe, you just like completely different games from what we're talking about and this not even your concern dude. I think you just don't like high-powered games allt hat much and guess what, this kind of thing isn't a concern at low-levels of DnD.

this balance concern? this desire to play super fighters you don't like? nothing to do with your low-powered fun, so if you really don't like people butting in with concepts that don't fit, take your own medicine and stop bringing up low-powered campaigns and preferences when talking about a high-powered problem. E6 is a thing after all.

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I keep bringing up DBZ because it's a reference I know most people will get for a characters with unhinged exponential / variable power levels and bad writing, and hits on characters who are grossly out of place in other settings and in other styles of fiction. Pick whatever subpar shonen trainwreck with "fighters" screaming about their feels, gloating about their power, and insulting each other for 20 minutes of every episode works best, I guess. But I'm not bringing it up to attack high power levels, I'm bringing it up as one of several examples of characters that don't fit in settings.

I played a gob-ton of Champions -- you know, superheroes? That was my intro to the HERO system.

Leaping to a string of unfounded conclusions trying to guess at my motives and preferences so you can insult me into leaving the thread isn't actually going to work. I mean, why is it that the more examples I give of glaring character/setting mismatches, the more you try to insist I should shut up and leave? Unlike you, I won't voice my guesses as to your motives there.

I haven't actually said anywhere in this thread that I think D&D Fighters or other "martial" Classes shouldn't reach the same power levels as the spellcasters at higher levels. I've never said that Fighters, etc, should be less powerful than spellcasters. Go ahead, look all you want, you won't find it.

What I HAVE said is that certain explanations for how a Fighter, etc, might reach that power level simply don't work and don't fit in the typical D&D quasi-medievaloid setting with human-like-humans, etc. I'm not telling you that your Fighter, etc, can never be as powerful as a Wizard -- I'm telling you that certain character concepts and certain explanations for how your PC reaches that power level are just grossly inappropriate for a number of settings.

What I HAVE said is that you can't have everything, and that balance is one thing that you could give up... or you could give up ultrapowerful spellcasters... or you could give up the idea that Fighters aren't "extranormal".

What I HAVE said is that if you really want your Fighters to be utterly and totally not-extra-normal in concept and (ugh) "archetype"... then they can't have the same level of extranormal power than the spellcasters get in the same system and settings (that is, the one at hand, D&D). But it doesn't matter what system or setting you're using, if your concept would not justify the power level you want, then you have to give up the concept, or give up the power level.

Well, you can have both... if you give up a coherent setting... but this is the point in the "conversation" where you've typically started ironically trying to defend your "anything goes it's fantasy dude" enjoyment by insisting that any attempt to keep the game enjoyable for those gamers whose enjoyment rests in part on immersion via setting and character coherence... is an "attack" on your enjoyment.

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Originally Posted by Pex

You're missing the point. It has nothing to do with "how dare you play a high powered character" - my words. What he's saying is if you're playing a high powered game it's not right for a player to bring in a low powered character and blame the game for not supporting it. That's the inverse. If you don't want to play Punching a hole in the universe to another plane Guy then don't, but when you're playing such a character, the Guy At The Gym, don't do it in the same game as a spellcaster who casts a spell that does create a hole in the universe leading to another plane of existence. If you do anyway, don't cry the spellcaster is too powerful.

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Exactly.

And don't try to play a low-power concept at high power levels and then say "but balance" when the concept doesn't justify that power level within that setting/campaign.

The problem isn't just that some system is trying to keep Guy At The Gym down, and it's certainly not that some system is trying to restrict certain concepts to Guy At The Gym power levels -- it's at least as much that certain players want to play Guy At The Gym concepts and then give them Punches The Universe guy powers, or claim that a character can reach extranormal levels of power while supposedly being utterly, totally, nope-no-sir-not-at-all-extranormal... and then blame the game when it doesn't work, rather than looking to the disconnect between their concept, the system, and the setting.

If you want your Fighter to do superhuman things, fine, but stop telling me your fighter is not-superhuman.

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

I mostly started this thread to discuss why fantasy characters expected to fight against reality warping demi-gods shouldn't be held to the same standards of reality as our own, along with giving characters the same level of power regardless of class.

I want to hear what people think a character of this level concept should be capable of doing, not arguing over what does and doesn't count as magic or what sort of world could produce these beings. Like if a Caster gets to be Doctor Strange at X Level, let a Fighter be 616 Thor at the same level and let a Barbarian be 616 Hulk when put on the same scale.

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The thing is, these aren't very interesting questions.

Of course all character concepts supported by the game should be able to successfully match up with the challenges supported by the game at appropriate capability benchmarks (level, character point totals, etc.). This is obviously true, the fact that many games mess it up is simply a reflection that many games (and especially tabletop games) are badly designed. Like really bad. This is an important thing to internalize actually: most tabletop game design is awful and most speculative fiction world-building is terrible. Additionally many speculative settings place an extremely low value on coherency and just don't care about either of these things, for both good and bad reasons.

As to the generalized capabilities of extremely high-powered characters, this is not interesting because at extreme levels of power the ability to model actions at any reasonable level of detail breaks down. Dr. Strange has whatever powers the plot requires him to have. Therefore Thor at the same level has the same and both of their 'powers' boil down to BS technobabble spouted between action moments that may or may not manage to preserve some level of verisimilitude. If you try to model abilities at such levels in a serious way you end up with absurd answers. XKCD has a nice long list of examples in his what if? segment, with a lot of the answers being 'the planet is destroyed and everyone dies.'

In popular media, fights between extremely powerful characters are often completely without any mechanical rigor. They unfold in a totally arbitrary way that is determined almost entirely by aesthetics and there's no way for a system to actually represent what is happening except at almost ludicrous levels of abstraction. That is what fighting games do, because they simply eliminate all possibility for outside interactions or external conditions. In fact, in many fighting games and in many video game RPGs (especially jRPGs, with the classic Final Fantasy style porting in and out of battle) it is implicitly understood that the combat you see on the screen bears no resemblance to what is actually happening according to the story. If you play an jRPG and then what the anime version of the same tale you can observe this directly. In-game character abilities are not intended to represent actual actions in the narrative of the fictional world in such cases.

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Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy

Well, you can have both... if you give up a coherent setting

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I think it is important to note that a lot, and I do mean a lot of the media out there, especially in terms of media inspired by speculative fiction absolutely do give up on coherent settings (but this certainly not limited by genre, high concept literature and contemporary visual arts are actually even more likely to do this). One Punch Man - something that several people have mentioned - does not even attempt to be a coherent setting. Why should it? The series is a gag comedy, the freaking title gives away the essential joke and even the theme music is in on the setup. Video games, as I mentioned above, often utilize extreme levels of abstraction in order to render their story and are not coherent as a result, but since the story can be broadly divorced from the gameplay in video games through the use of various methods like porting in and out of combat this works fine. Single author fiction can be extremely low in coherency because it has a bunch of tools to hide this issue from the audience.

However, and this is very important, tabletop RPGs have an extremely high demand for setting coherency and mechanical balance compared to other forms of fiction or even other types of games. This happens because they are so open ended. In theory a game accepts any possible input that player can devise and the engine must produce an appropriate output for that. Most other forms of game severely restrict inputs and outputs. In terms of the former, consider the classic sidescroller - in such a game the player's character is restricted to movement in a two-dimensional plane and can interact with objects only through walking into them bodily or via attacking them. This also means the game only needs to provide extremely restricted outputs: walking into something in a side-scroller means you stop, you walk through it, you damage it, or it damages you, and that's pretty much it. Contrast this with the D&D example of: "I cast Wish." The one spell is enough to cause most game engines to curl up and cry in a corner. Heck, when Baldur's Gate II looked into implementing that particular spell they had to create an entire minigame setup that restricted the potential outputs to a tight range of ~6 options as a result.

A useful comparison would be historical fiction. High accuracy historical fiction imposes huge burdens of an author that writing exactly the same story in a fictionalized version of the world might not, because real history often throws out annoyances like two locations being hundreds of miles apart or conflicts lasting longer than the lifespan of a single human. The fantasy fiction of Guy Gavriel Kay, notably, takes historical conflicts (the Ad Lushan rebellion during the Tang Dynasty is the backdrop for his novel Under Heaven for example) and places them into a fictional world because this allows him to alter the events according to his desires in order to build a frictionless narrative. Tabletop RPGs have the problem that the world must be able to sustain itself against the disparate choices of 2-6 people who may have widely divergent desires. And the more power the characters those players control have compared to the setting backdrop, the more difficult this becomes, until at some point it becomes completely impossible - DBZ is a nice and clear example of a situation where you've crossed this threshold because all potential characters can literally blow apart the setting at any time.

Capping character power is a very effective means of increasing the robustness of a tabletop RPG setting. For example, if it is impossible for any character in the setting to massacre and an entire town, then you just don't have to worry about the implications of characters like that existing. A superhero setting wherein no hero or villain is so powerful that they can't be stopped by rolling in an armored cavalry division is inherently more stable than one where nothing but other supers can stop a super who decides that 'kill all the things' is their purpose in life (several of the recent X-Men films have collapsed into giant piles of stupid for this reason, notably Apocalypse).

A setting that has 'god-wizards' at all is almost certainly sacrificing coherency, which is why adding 'god-fighters' alongside them isn't actually a problem of any significance. The issue of characters who have access to some form of extra-normal phlebotinum-based abilities versus those who are bounded by extant physics is more more interesting and much more important when at the lower end of the power scale. The question of what kind of powers and how much oomph they possess you can have and still preserve balance is actually of far greater importance in a setting where 'guy at the gym' remains a viable concept.

This thread has been a really fascinating read, and I would like to throw in my two cents about the applicability of the Guy at the Gym Fallacy.

I'll be rooting much of my thoughts about this fallacy in 3.5 terms because that is where it was born. But to begin with I believe there are Four common barriers to how the fallacy can come to be in any given system.

The first barrier is the Designer of the system, their assumptions about what they believe the thresholds for those who are considered mundane to be for that system, and how those limitations can be overcome, if at all. This is expressed in the rules for the given system. As a quantifiable example, the Jump Skill has clearly defined terms, it is a DC 30 to complete a 30ft long jump, which when completed by the character will break the current world record for Long Jump, 29 ft, 4 and 1 quarters of an inch.

The next barrier, but not necessarily the second one, is the Player and their character, their expectations for what their characters can achieve, and the other feats they can achieve even if by accident. A player might design their fighter to be agile, and deft with a sword and shield, with visions of them starting a squire, and eventually growing into a legendary knight who will have songs sung of them for the ages. They invest their limited skills in their class abilities, and sprinkle in a few cross-class skills to give them extra options. This is expressed by full ranks in the Jump skill, and a few levels into Tumble. When we look at this character at the presumably "Superheroic" level 8, they will have 11 ranks in the Jump skill, and 5 in the Tumble skill, and at this time, it is not unreasonable to say they have a Strength of 20, giving them a total +18 to Jump checks. This means that a little under half the time they make a Jump check, with a running start of course, they will beat our current world record.

This leads to the next barrier, the GM. I've had one friend who was raised on AD&D call 3.5 the "player edition" because players can just point to rules and just execute certain actions without the GM having input, and while there is a whole other discussion to be had about the merits and flaws of this, the merit in this case is that the player can simply point to their rule book and say "I've completed a world record breaking jump." The GM of course might decide that that is flatly impossible due to their own biases, indeed that's partly where the Fallacy has come from. Their own expectations are being defied, and they shut down the idea without a second thought. Especially if the character invests greater resources, like the Run, Acrobatic, and Leap of the Heavens feats, giving them a total +11 bonus to Jump checks meaning that even on a natural 1 they will consistently shatter the world record, which may not gel with their idea of what an 8th level character can do.

Which ties into what I would call the Second barrier over all, the Setting in which the game is placed. Many posters in this thread have brought it up, the idea that many settings work on the assumption of "our world, but with magic" or similar issues along those lines. This can be especially egregious with settings that have long histories and many Stories set in them, like the Forgotten Realms. The assumptions of the writers of that setting might not always gel with current rules. Even in Order of the Stick which had it's roots in 3rd edition D&D, when the plot grew Rich put a priority on his storytelling ahead of clinging to the rules specifically, largely because the rules can break the plot and drama. The deeper issues the rules create, even for mundanes breaking the laws of perceived reality for the setting are not often deeply explored, that's how we get things like the Commoner Railgun. The Rules Says it works, but setting writers would not use those rules oddities as default assumptions for settings.

This loops back to the GM barrier, their expectations for their story and plot being over-ridden by a seemingly "mundane" action can break their immersion, a wizard casting a spell to soar 60 feet into the air is expected, a fighter leaping 60ft clear through the air defies their expectation, and therefore can be seen as wrong.

All of this becomes compounded when different rules in a given system, while making sense on their own, do not work well with others. Let's go back to that 8th level character invested in the Jump skill, the feats represent amazing training, their legs are like pistons, which let them launch themselves further than anyone else in the world! They now encounter an Iron Door. Clearly, with such powerful legs, they can kick the door open! Unfortunately with a Strength Modifier of only +5, they are unable to roll high enough (Break DC 28) to actually kick it open with one solid blow. That's okay, let's batter it down over a few rounds! With a hardness of 10, and the maximum unarmed damage of 8 from their kicks, it's still impossible.

This of course leads to a larger issue of Mundane Characters can't have nice things, but I think I've meandered away from my core point enough already.

The short version of all of this is that expectations from the Designers, Setting, DMs and Players all impact perceptions of what is allowable at a given table. Personally, I am on the side that would allow a Mundane character of 10+ levels to do things considered physically impossible, if only because I believe it makes for a more interesting story than just saying no.

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Originally Posted by Mechalich

The thing is, these aren't very interesting questions.

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And yet here we are on the tenth page of a thread dedicated to discussing them. I think the problem is we have kind of gone out of order. So Max_Killjoy and Lord Raziere are arguing back and forth about setting consistency and as far as I can tell there has been no discussion about what types of abilities or what scale of abilities they are talking about. If you want me to guess the size of the wave a rock thrown into a pond will be, I would like to know how big the rock is.

So if everyone is in agreement about the guy at the gym fallacy, then we can figure out what sort of abilities fantastic (of fantasy) martial would have. Then we could return to the world building discussion, figure out common categories (even if we don't agree on the names), talk about bias in GM calls and how to fight it, how to write rules or flavour to help get the idea across or whatever. But until then we are trying to build a tower without a foundation.

In conclusion, even if those are boring questions I think we need to answer them to move onto the interesting ones.

And I just had an idea for a tier/scale system to help cover that. Its going to take me a bit to work it out though.

[QUOTE=Cluedrew;24228077]Back on topic: For abilities that it is appropriate for a martial to have, well I've got a few major types and I'll give a few examples for each.

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Technical - Based on control, refinement and execution: Cutting the wind (ranged attacks with melee weapon), aiming for the right places to disable an enemy, extra defences and reactions and various special techniques.

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Hm, I'd probably add onto it by adding being able to reflect ranged spells. Definitely onboard with aiming to disable an enemy, with laser precision that far exceeds what a normal person can do.

Come to think of it, Roronoa Zoro is a good example of cutting the air.


Would give melee users an option for ranged attacks beyond carrying around a bunch of arrows on the off chance they run into a flying enemy, and they can still use the weapon they're more familiar with. Or just cutting through a group of people in front of you, possibly being so skilled with an attack that it can selectively miss certain targets...

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Strength - Raw power and toughness: Basic applications of strength like lifting might be underestimated (lots of supplies, moving things out of the way), throwing large objects is handy (as a siege weapon), the ability to stay rooted against immense force, shockwave attacks and of course wielding a really big weapon.

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My favorite stat in games lol. But yes, I feel such a character should be able to carry around quite a lot on their backs. Hm, maybe a few tons.

Pretty much being able to perform anything Sakura or Tsunade from Naruto can do with brute strength.


While useful for damage, it can also be used to change the terrain of a battlefield that makes it harder for the enemy to run across, knock the enemy to the ground, and even create extra ranged ammunition in the form of being able to pick up rubble and hurl it at enemies. Suddenly everything is a weapon.

Now I'm imagining the car boxing gloves that the Hulk used in Ultimate Destruction and the 2008 movie.

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Agility - Speed and flexibility: Wall run and other acrobatics, stealth and sneaking, slight of hand tricks, accuracy, rate-of-fire and trick shots with ranged weapons (rate of attack with melee weapons attack), dodging and always going first.

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Ryu Hayabusa is all I could think about when reading this part, he'd probably serve as a good source of inspiration. I'd say he's more of an agile warrior as opposed to someone that uses strength like Kratos.

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Will/Emotion - Based on overriding the bodies normal limits: Super-states, continuing to fight unhindered by injury, sensing danger and resisting or ignoring magical effects.

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Combat precognition is a good place to start, probably by forcing an enemy attacking the player to reroll a die and take the lower roll, or letting a player who is trying to save against an explosion or something reroll and take the higher amount to simulate their ability to perceive danger as/before it's happening.

As to super states, I'm partial to Kratos' Spartan Rage myself, as it temporarily makes him invulnerable and boosts his damage output. Not the only way to go about it, but mine.

Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry also comes to mind, as while it doesn't make the character invulnerable, it does increase their healing factor, damage output and (in the case of Nero) gives them the more damage in the form of more attacks during one of his grab animations.

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Auxiliary Skills - Other non-magic abilities I think fit a "physical" or "worldly" character: Cooking so tasty it functions as healing potions, singing and preforming to inspire (as bard), camouflage, disguise, lying, construction of safe shelters, negotiation and bartering, crafting effectively magically items, leadership and communication.

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I've actually been thinking about concepts such as this.

Say for example a Bard that has a high enough score on singing should be capable of winning over anything to their side. Including forces of nature and divine beasts. Essentially they could sing their way into the underworld and play such beautiful music that the normally grumpy Demon Lord would be happy to give this puny mortal all their treasure... Then later on realize, "WTF was I thinking doing that?"

As for lying... I imagine it could be a form of brain washing. For example:

Player: Hey, so, I need to get into this building.
Guard: Let me see your papers.
Player: Let me see YOUR papers.
Guard:... I'm legally required to tell you that you need to leave before I can retaliate.
Player: *Rolls* I've worked here for 20 years.
Guard: That can't be right... But, you seem familiar.
Player: *Rolls* Yeah, I brought you that gift for your birthday, don't tell me you forgot?
Guard: ... I... Don't think I did? No, I remember that gift...
Player: *Rolls* You should know better than to forget your boss' face.
Guard: I'm sorry, I'm just so... You look different?
Player: *Rolls* I look exactly the same since you last saw me. Because I'm your boss.
Guard:.... I guess you are... No wait, I remember now...
Player: *Rolls* I was there for your wedding!
Guard: I'm married?!
Player: *Rolls* You don't remember your own wedding party, did you hit your head?
Guard: I must have... Oh no... I forgot all about my wedding?! Sorry to take up your valuable time, step right on in.
Player: Hey, thanks... And if anyone else claiming to be me comes by, you know you need to kill them...
Guard: But...
Player: *Rolls* That's an order!
Guard: I will follow my orders!
Player: *Enters* Now where's this money...?
Other Guard: Who are you?!
Player: *Rolls*... I'm the King of our fine country, show me to the royal vault.


Not magic... Just so overwhelmingly believable and charming that something that's obviously not true is regarded as it by anyone that hears it.

Along with crafting weapons so well made that they're magic, sure. As well as being able to craft weapons from materials that require far more strength/finesse than magic alone can get. Essentially, you've become Hephaestus/Brokk and Sindri and can create weapons so amazing that the gods themselves would be honored to receive them as gifts.

Good ideas all around. Might expand on them if I get anymore ideas.

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Originally Posted by Cluedrew

And yet here we are on the tenth page of a thread dedicated to discussing them.

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Not really, we've mostly been discussing much broader and more significant design questions that 'what hypothetical powers should a god-martial have.'

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I think the problem is we have kind of gone out of order. So Max_Killjoy and Lord Raziere are arguing back and forth about setting consistency and as far as I can tell there has been no discussion about what types of abilities or what scale of abilities they are talking about. If you want me to guess the size of the wave a rock thrown into a pond will be, I would like to know how big the rock is.

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Well, in order to gauge the size of the wave, I not only need to know the size of the rock, but also the size of the pond. That's the thing, there's no absolute evaluation based simply on a character's power. A 'god-level' character's absolute power can vary massively depending on the setting. Put broadly a 'god' character is one who has sufficient personal puissance that they can act with almost complete impunity with regard to 'the masses' in a given setting and the only beings who represent any threat to them are some very small number of peers. The deities of classical myth actually fit this definition quite well. The Greek Gods were not presumed to live in some distant faraway plane, but actually in the world itself (and the underworld was presumed to by a physical place you could walk to), yet their power was such that they could defeat limitless numbers of mortals if they actually wished to do so and even half-mortal demigods had no power to stand against them in prolonged tests.

The amount of power to achieve this state, however, varies immensely depending on how powerful the masses, and any heroic or advanced military groups among them, actually are. For example, if you crank the clock back to 10,000 BCE, the amount of potency necessary to be invincible isn't that high. A moderately powerful being like Optimus Prime would be invincible in that context and could stride across the world as a living (of sorts) god. Meanwhile when you swing the timeline forward to the 21st, and the US military has beat poor Optimus down pretty hard in several Michael Bay movies.

Also, in the reverse circumstance, if you drop a big enough rock into a small enough pond, you don't have any pond afterwards. This is the 'super-high-powered settings inherently lose coherency' issue. In this case talking about specific abilities is a waste of time, because the setting can only exist by fiat anyway. 3.X D&D, with it's god-wizards, definitely has this problem. Characters like Elminster and Larloch are too powerful for the Europe-sized Forgotten Realms and the setting consequently doesn't work save through the special pleading to not have such characters ever actually do anything (it's right in the 3e FRCS under 'the role of the mighty').

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So if everyone is in agreement about the guy at the gym fallacy, then we can figure out what sort of abilities fantastic (of fantasy) martial would have. Then we could return to the world building discussion, figure out common categories (even if we don't agree on the names), talk about bias in GM calls and how to fight it, how to write rules or flavour to help get the idea across or whatever. But until then we are trying to build a tower without a foundation.

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The abilities of a god-tier character aren't actually different between a fighter and a wizard in terms of outputs, only aesthetics. It doesn't really matter whether you acquire them through sword-awesome or spell-awesome so long as they both have the relevant impacts. The Servants of FATE/ franchises have all kinds of variable powers but whether they are sword or spell based is broadly irrelevant. That's a franchise in which Shakespeare, Medea, and King Arthur can all hurl city-smashing energy blasts, even though one uses a sword, one uses a staff, and one uses a quill pen.

Some general conditions of god-tier status though might be:

• Immunity to any reasonably available damage form (like the One Ring had)
• Ability to bypass any known defense and arbitrarily slay any non god-tier being
• the ability to ignore any known environmental conditions
• the ability to substantially modify the local environment and/or render localized areas uninhabitable
• the ability to move in any desired direction and to bypass any available barriers
• immunity to supernatural mental influence and mind control

That's surely not comprehensive and there would be a lot of variation from one setting to the next, but I think it gets the general idea across.

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Originally Posted by Mechalich

I think it is important to note that a lot, and I do mean a lot of the media out there, especially in terms of media inspired by speculative fiction absolutely do give up on coherent settings (but this certainly not limited by genre, high concept literature and contemporary visual arts are actually even more likely to do this). One Punch Man - something that several people have mentioned - does not even attempt to be a coherent setting. Why should it? The series is a gag comedy, the freaking title gives away the essential joke and even the theme music is in on the setup. Video games, as I mentioned above, often utilize extreme levels of abstraction in order to render their story and are not coherent as a result, but since the story can be broadly divorced from the gameplay in video games through the use of various methods like porting in and out of combat this works fine. Single author fiction can be extremely low in coherency because it has a bunch of tools to hide this issue from the audience.

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And there's one reason a lot of fiction and video games lose me... I end up saying (or at least thinking) "Wait, what? But..."

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Originally Posted by Cluedrew

I just a thought, we seem to be talking a lot about whether it would be called magic or not, if this should be considered world building or not. But is there any actual disagreements, major statements about the guy at the gym fallacy? Or does anyone disagree with the following statement.

Regardless of a character's archetype or skill set, all characters and character abilities should be given the same standards of plausibility.

At least in broad strokes, I can think of one corner case where it doesn't apply (which is to say when the implausible powers are so weak normal abilities can over power them) and I'm sure particular setting concepts might want to go against this. But is there anyone who thinks that this is not a good guide line or starting point?

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Pretty much this. The core of GATGF is basically "Magic can do anything and it needs no explanation as to why, while non-magic (even superhuman) characters must be forced to adhere to their limitations at all times".

And no, having to follow three laws of magic or whatever isn't the same as having to follow the "IRL realism".

Things high level warriors could be able to do:

Apply negative conditions such as blind, paralyzed, stunned, significant minus numbers to various game statistics or disadvantage for games like 5E that have it. Flavor text it as "called shots". Can apply multiple conditions, eventually in one attack, and also against more than one foe at a time. Doing so should be in addition to raw damage or the condition lasts long enough to be worth not doing damage instead since imposing death is the ultimate condition wanted.

Ignore exhaustion. Can do physical activities at near limitless level - running, climbing, swimming, etc. Movement speed is unaffected or even better increased regardless of movement type. Movement type becomes glorified flavor text. I can acquiesce flying remains requiring magic (tech) or racial feature, but jumping a great height or distance to simulate flying for that round is fine.

Be resilient in defense. That does not mean immune to everything or resistant to everything, but rather have a fair chance defending against harmful effects. Particular immunities or resistances are fine. It's also ok to have a weakness as long as that weakness is not for such a popular mode of attack every bad guy is doing it.

Specialize in an ability score. In D&D terms Superman like strength or Flash like dexterity or Wolverine like constitution etc. Effects are commensurate with the gameworld/system but have that one thing they are very, very good at.

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Originally Posted by Cluedrew

I just a thought, we seem to be talking a lot about whether it would be called magic or not, if this should be considered world building or not. But is there any actual disagreements, major statements about the guy at the gym fallacy? Or does anyone disagree with the following statement.

Regardless of a character's archetype or skill set, all characters and character abilities should be given the same standards of plausibility.

At least in broad strokes, I can think of one corner case where it doesn't apply (which is to say when the implausible powers are so weak normal abilities can over power them) and I'm sure particular setting concepts might want to go against this. But is there anyone who thinks that this is not a good guide line or starting point?

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I love this post, so decided to reiterate. Well, at the very least for player characters in a cooperative class and level based tabletop roleplaying game...

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Originally Posted by Cluedrew

Back on topic: For abilities that it is appropriate for a martial to have, well I've got a few major types and I'll give a few examples for each.

Technical - Based on control, refinement and execution: Cutting the wind (ranged attacks with melee weapon), aiming for the right places to disable an enemy, extra defences and reactions and various special techniques.

Strength - Raw power and toughness: Basic applications of strength like lifting might be underestimated (lots of supplies, moving things out of the way), throwing large objects is handy (as a siege weapon), the ability to stay rooted against immense force, shockwave attacks and of course wielding a really big weapon.

Agility - Speed and flexibility: Wall run and other acrobatics, stealth and sneaking, slight of hand tricks, accuracy, rate-of-fire and trick shots with ranged weapons (rate of attack with melee weapons attack), dodging and always going first.

Will/Emotion - Based on overriding the bodies normal limits: Super-states, continuing to fight unhindered by injury, sensing danger and resisting or ignoring magical effects.

Auxiliary Skills - Other non-magic abilities I think fit a "physical" or "worldly" character: Cooking so tasty it functions as healing potions, singing and preforming to inspire (as bard), camouflage, disguise, lying, construction of safe shelters, negotiation and bartering, crafting effectively magically items, leadership and communication.

Semi-Mystical - Magic but from a body based view point for characters close to the line: Enchant weapons and armour, identify spells and other magical effects, controlling spirit or ki, calling magical allies, disabling or negating magical effects with physical actions.

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Originally Posted by Pex

Things high level warriors could be able to do:

Apply negative conditions such as blind, paralyzed, stunned, significant minus numbers to various game statistics or disadvantage for games like 5E that have it. Flavor text it as "called shots". Can apply multiple conditions, eventually in one attack, and also against more than one foe at a time. Doing so should be in addition to raw damage or the condition lasts long enough to be worth not doing damage instead since imposing death is the ultimate condition wanted.

Ignore exhaustion. Can do physical activities at near limitless level - running, climbing, swimming, etc. Movement speed is unaffected or even better increased regardless of movement type. Movement type becomes glorified flavor text. I can acquiesce flying remains requiring magic (tech) or racial feature, but jumping a great height or distance to simulate flying for that round is fine.

Be resilient in defense. That does not mean immune to everything or resistant to everything, but rather have a fair chance defending against harmful effects. Particular immunities or resistances are fine. It's also ok to have a weakness as long as that weakness is not for such a popular mode of attack every bad guy is doing it.

Specialize in an ability score. In D&D terms Superman like strength or Flash like dexterity or Wolverine like constitution etc. Effects are commensurate with the gameworld/system but have that one thing they are very, very good at.

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And any decent attempt at listing mechanics candidates are good in my book.

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Originally Posted by Ignimortis

Pretty much this. The core of GATGF is basically "Magic can do anything and it needs no explanation as to why, while non-magic (even superhuman) characters must be forced to adhere to their limitations at all times".

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Originally Posted by Lucas Yew

I love this post, so decided to reiterate. Well, at the very least for player characters in a cooperative class and level based tabletop roleplaying game...

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Thank-you, I'm glad people appreciate it.

Anyways the next part of is inspired by Pex's post, in that there is a second axis to the abilities which is category of effect. The first axis being the category of justification I mentioned before. Also I'm stopping at category because narrowing it down strikes me as too fine grained. So reading the opponent and blocking incoming blows, being fast enough to completely dodge out of the way or being so tough blows bounce off you all have similar effects of stopping incoming attacks (although the dodge might be the riskiest while toughness lets a bit of damage through, so not exactly the same) but they all fall into different categories of justification.

The third axis is power level, I'm still working on this but so far I have:

• Human Level: As a regular average human, the minimum for most PCs, only disabled people would be below this which is a very interesting but different conversation.
• Peak-Human Level: Upper level of real human achievement and any made up effects balanced against it. Only really an important threshold if you are trying to set the game in "reality" or something that could be hidden in reality.
• Super-Human Levels: I need to divide this one up because right now it is everything between the levels around it.
• Wish-Complete Level: The top, we had a whole discussion about wish complete abilities that all effectively translate into each other. Like using "destroy anything" to control randomness by destroying possible futures where the randomness did not come out the way you wanted.

I've been loving this discussion.

So, it seems to me that, at its core, GatG is an issue of the GM saying, "that's not realistic", and being empowered to shut down actions on those grounds.

In that regard, one could argue that I am a *huge* perpetrator of GatG. Although, to be fair, I've done it at least often to people's "creative" uses of magic as I have to muggles.

There are many ways to address GatG, but (so that I don't lose this post) for now I'll just list what I think is the easiest (to discuss): encode things into the rules. When the rules tell you what you can do, that's what you can do - ignore any thoughts of "real world" physics. Calls to "real world physics" should only be made for things that the rules do not cover. Encode things into the rules, and explicitly disempower the GM from making those calls.

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

Personally, I just want people to stop telling me I shouldn't be allowed to participate in high level play because I prefer more grounded characters. I want to fight dragons, I want to save the world, I want to destroy evil artifacts and foil the schemes of wicked gods, I want to battle evil archmages and defeat the Lich King and his undead hordes, I want to be a hero; I just want to do it as an underdog who succeeds through skill, courage, and determination rather than a demigod who succeeds through overwhelming displays of power.

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You built your own system, right? Does it allow such "underdog" characters to succeed? If so, how?

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Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy

Go to HERO, which was built for a wide scale of superheroic campaigns based on different character point totals for the builds, and put an objectively-statted Batman or Punisher in a game with a bunch of objectively-statted superhumans, they come out to a lower point total,

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OK, I couldn't let this one slide - because skills are so expensive in Heroes, and because Batman is so skilled in so many areas, I think that Batman would probably cost more points than, and still be weaker than Superman, if statted up in Heroes.

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Originally Posted by malachi

Or, if the intent is to literally be an 'underdog', you should intentionally play a lower level PC (and possibly intentionally choose not to level up).

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1st level character in a 7th level party, and I sent him "on vacation" when he started to catch up, to retain his "underdog" status. Been there, done that, agree that it's an awesome way to go. However, it doesn't capture every flavor of "underdog".

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Originally Posted by malachi

This brings to mind the party that Quertus brings up occasionally: Basically-Thor, a sentient potted plant (that may or may not be able to communicate or move), and some number of other players (probably 10+, if I recall his normal group size).
In a game like D&D, would Basically-Thor and the potted plant be represented as having the same level?
In a game like HERO / GURPS, would those two have the same number of ability points (or whatever the unit of character-building currency is in that game)?

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In 3e, Basically!Thor might have had, say, a free Paragon template (in 2e, "being a god" didn't cost levels, any more than it did in the homebrew system we were using). I imagine trying to recreate them in most point-based systems, Basically!Thor would have cost a lot more points than my plant, or anyone else in the party.

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Originally Posted by Tvtyrant

Other classics include a mundane scout vs. a druid in hawk/insect form,

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And here we touch on how I GatG poor, defenseless Wizards. The mundane scout? He made his rolls, he goes unnoticed. The Druid? People notice him, and, if they make their rolls, notice that he isn't behaving like a hawk/insect should (or possibly even "isn't indigenous to this area") - and react accordingly.

What now, GatG?

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Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy

I'm not going to ask a GM to pretzel their entire setting just so I can have my special-snowflake character...

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I seem to have lost the QUOTE from you where you explicitly called out running a shadow-bender in Avatar.

So, if they required you (you required them/me) to change the geography of the world, build an entire new continent for a nation of Shadow-benders, that would contradict established canon. I can see that as a bad thing.

But if a new season of Avatar came out, and it was revealed that some bloody giant turtle had, thousands of years ago, on a whim, experimented with new "elements", and created shadow-benders? And that, like the stupid air nomad raiders, they had just "avoided notice" somehow? That would not, IMO, make the setting any less consistent than it already is.

So I say run your shadow-bender, if you can come up with a story that matches the level of "coherence" in Avatar.

Now, iirc, the first time you tried to convince me that HP were an incoherent mess, we went back and forth, because you said "x+Y makes them incoherent", and I showed how that wasn't an issue for me. So repeat with x+Y+z, still not an issue. Finally, once you added in half the alphabet, and I squinted really hard, I conceded that, under that edge case, HP finally broke down. Whatever it was, it didn't really phase me enough to care - HP work just fine 99+% of the time as an abstract game simplification.

Why did I bring up HP? Well, other than because it's in the OP, it's because, despite how much I care about world-building and consistency, even I don't view it as a "100%" thing. I mean, many people may have to aim for 100% just to fail me less at 50% instead of 20%, sure, but, for a game abstraction, I leave a little wiggle room at 99+%. So, much like HP, if you cannot accept a 99+% accuracy rating, then we'll have to accept that we have different preferences. And that some people don't care if coherency is at 1-%.

But, if you disagree with me regarding how incoherent adding Shadow-benders would make the Avatar setting, do you believe that it would be valuable to others in this thread for us to go back and forth, as we did with HP, for you to explain this difference to me?

So, the one thing that always puzzles me every time a thread about the guy at the gym comes up; high level martials in D&D already have a plethora of super-powers in the form of magic items. Why do people think that giving them innate powers will suddenly allow them to compete with casters?

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

About Captain Hobo... I looked that up on Google, nothing about that came up at all. Did you coin the term or is it pre-existing?

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I did not coin the term. I am not sure where it originated, but I have seen it used several times on this and other forums and was able to find a definition with a google search.

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

... You're asking me why the fantasy giant that lives in the fantasy world isn't conforming to the laws of our world? Why the fantastic creature that would probably be suffering the square-cube law in our world isn't suffering from it in a fantasy world?

Second, yes, I would say something like that would be superhumanly tough. You could even use it being superhumanly tough to explain how it doesn't have glass bones, blood pressure issues or having severe trouble being able to even stand upright without external help like the a real person of a much shorter height would be would be. I remember reading the world's tallest man had a host of health issues, including not being able to stand on his own, and he was much lighter than a Hill Giant would be.

Third, yes, I can see a superhuman fighter killing a superhuman giant when he's dealing out more than enough damage to kill a regular man 10x over. A Commoner has 4 HP. A hill giant in 5E does 3d8+5 damage, that's enough to kill a Commoner nearly twice over even if the giant rolled all 1s. Yes, there are frail people in or world, but I doubt a regular human being is going to be able durable to take that much damage without instantly getting splattered or maimed so bad that the fight's over then and there... Much like how getting hit by a regular size club could potentially mess up a normal person, a giant one would probably be worse.

Slight tangent, but a lot of monsters in fantasy wouldn't work in real life. Dragons wouldn't be able to fly, and they'd need hollow bones. Trolls would be walking tumors or withered husks that would almost certainly die before they reached adulthood. Invisible creatures shouldn't be able to see anything since light is passing through their entire bodies. If you want to bring real world physics into it, congratulations, a lot of monsters in D&D are now dead, blind, incredibly fragile and generally harmless.

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Ok then, replace the giant with a large real world animal like an elephant, or whale, or dinosaur. They are still immune to death by falling in D&D.

If you say that maybe all animals in D&D land are supernatural because its a magic world; that raises further questions about why this doesn't apply to humanoids unless they have sufficient levels. And also, the same HP and falling rules apply to d20 systems that aren't meant to take place in a magical world such as d20 modern, d20 Call of Cthulhu, or d20 Star Wars.

IMO, HP is an abstraction for the purposes of gameplay, not an attempt to simulate real combat or to make a statement about the nature of the fictional world.

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

Yeah, from your perspective, that's not what I'm doing though. I'm trying to add more options, but you're telling me I'm doing it wrong.

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Ok, let me try this again.

You asked for a reason why you wouldn't give everyone innate powers like they would have in a shonen anime, and I responded by saying because that is the monk's gimmick, and doing so makes the monk feel less special.

In D&D most every class has a unique power source. Wizards use the arcane secrets of the cosmos to run programs in reality, clerics channel the power of a god, sorcrers have an innate bloodline, psionicists use mental abilities, druids channel the power of nature, sorcerers utilize magical bloodlines, warlocks make pacts with demons, etc.

Fighters are masters of combat, particularly armed and armored combat, while monks use chi energy to push their bodies to superhuman levels. Changing the base game to ensure that they are the same archetype reduces the total number of archetypes in the game by one.

I personally see this in Forgotten Realms, where they have made rangers, druids, and paladins all channel the powers of a god and making them all types of clerics, and IMO the setting is poorer for it.

This is not to say there is no room for multi-class fighter monks (this is actually my personal favorite class), or that hybrid classes like the sword sage or kensai shouldn't exist. I am also not saying that you can't re-fluff your character however you like; if you want to say your high HP and damage are the result of a superhuman physique which may or may not be the result of KI, just like you could also say it was a divine blessing or a protective spell or whatever you like.

I am also not saying that you shouldn't have a campaign world that runs in a different manner; one modelled of shonen anime probably should give everyone innate chi powers, just like a Harry Potter style wizard-school campaign should probably give everyone some arcane spell-casting ability even if they aren't of the wizard class.

But for default D&D, I think the game greatly benefits by having a multitude of separate archetypes and power sources.

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

Actually, I've presented evidence that a high level fighter is more than a regular person, but you keep ignoring it.

I googled it, and what came up is, "Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc."

Yes, it's a fantasy game, nobody is arguing against that. It also had the Superhero title in it, but you also ignored that too because it was convenient and your only reason was, "Batman and Punisher don't have superpowers... Even if they're the exception, the title has to apply like it would for them.". It also has ki using monks in it, but you ignored that too. I'm getting the impression you're going to ignore everything else I say, even if it's in the game itself like "8th Level Fighters are called Superheroes, there's ki using Monks, eldritch abominations and plenty of other things."

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I really don't want to get into a semantic argument or an increasingly hostile argument where we try and nitpick genres.

Early editions of the game use the term Superhero. You take this to mean fighters have super powers; I take it to mean that it was probably meant to refer to a superhero without powers like batman, although it might have just been a careless decision made by someone trying to come up with clever names on the fly or even a joke.

IIRC, your evidence that fighters have super-powers is in the way the HP system works, which I refuted with a quote from Gary Gygax, which you dismissed.

I just don't understand why one word holds more weight to you than an in depth explanation of intent by the same author printed within the same set of core books.

And again, I don't think HP doesn't work the way you are describing, I am saying that any way you visualize HP it doesn't match up with the rest of the game, and I think it is best to just look at it as a pure game mechanic rather than trying to analyze it to the point of thinking Monopoly is crazy because a shoe can't be a landlord.

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Originally Posted by AntiAuthority

Yes, it's a fantasy game, nobody is arguing against that. It also had the Superhero title in it, but you also ignored that too because it was convenient and your only reason was, "Batman and Punisher don't have superpowers... Even if they're the exception, the title has to apply like it would for them.". It also has ki using monks in it, but you ignored that too. I'm getting the impression you're going to ignore everything else I say, even if it's in the game itself like "8th Level Fighters are called Superheroes, there's ki using Monks, eldritch abominations and plenty of other things."

Like AD&D has Superheroes in it? Doesn't matter, you'll ignore that it can be a superhero game even if it says "Superhero". Where were superheroes in Conan and Lord of the Rings? I loved when the Superman expy turned back time by flying around the world really fast when it looked like Frodo was about to lose.

Like D&D has psionics in it? Doesn't matter, you'll ignore it can be a sci-fi game. Where were all the psionics in Lord of the Rings and Conan? My favorite part of that movie was when the Carrie expy made the Balrog's brain explode.

Like D&D has Monks in it? Where were all the ki wielding, Eastern themed warriors in Conan and Lord of the Ring? I don't recall the Wuxia character doing flying kicks dozens of meters into the air and oneshotting Orcs with ki strikes, but I must have not seen that in the background during the Battle of Helm's Deep.

As far as I'm aware, none of those exist in the stories you cite D&D is meant to replicate. It's almost like you're inserting your personal biases into the game and trying to pass them off as facts to me... Essentially telling me how to play the game. But it's different when you do it, right?

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I will fully concede that D&D is a kitchen sink fantasy game and has had a lot of stuff added to it by a lot of people over the years, and trying to come away with one consistent vision is a fool's errand.

I strongly believe that at its core D&D is a mashup of the various Sword and Sorcery and High Fantasy stories published in the mid 20th century, or as one poster called it "Conan in Middle Earth," but I am not sure how to prove this as it is really more of a feeling. Maybe by looking the the inspirations chapter in the 1E DMG? Appendix N was it?

For me, personally, I read the novels before playing the game, and so I will always see the setting through the lense of the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance novels, which always depict fighters as incredibly skilled but ultimately human (or demihuman) figures. Even Drizzt never does anything that I couldn't picture Rambo doing in a similar situation, although I have not read the Forgotten Reams novels as extensively as I have Dragonlance.

If you want to play a higher powered martial go for it, although I really do wonder why you don't use the Tome of Battle as a baseline as it is already half way there.

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

So, the one thing that always puzzles me every time a thread about the guy at the gym comes up; high level martials in D&D already have a plethora of super-powers in the form of magic items. Why do people think that giving them innate powers will suddenly allow them to compete with casters?

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I don't think the goal is to get them to compete with casters, exactly, but rather to allow them to excel in their own spheres. A cleric who wakes up one morning and decides he wants to be a fighter can do so, and can actually do so better than the fighter himself can with equivalent resources. A wizard has a much harder time literally doing the same thing, but they have a bunch of extra resources to make it so that smacking somebody with a metal stick isn't as relevant.

A level 20 fighter should be better at fighting than a level 20 cleric, and the actual things that fighters do (eat enemy attacks, do damage with weapons) should be meaningful at high levels on their own merits. I don't necessarily care that a wizard can burn through an army of enemy grunts faster than the fighter, or knock down a building, or something equally grandiose, i just want the fighter to be good at what he is trying to do.

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Originally Posted by Keltest

I don't think the goal is to get them to compete with casters, exactly, but rather to allow them to excel in their own spheres. A cleric who wakes up one morning and decides he wants to be a fighter can do so, and can actually do so better than the fighter himself can with equivalent resources. A wizard has a much harder time literally doing the same thing, but they have a bunch of extra resources to make it so that smacking somebody with a metal stick isn't as relevant.

A level 20 fighter should be better at fighting than a level 20 cleric, and the actual things that fighters do (eat enemy attacks, do damage with weapons) should be meaningful at high levels on their own merits. I don't necessarily care that a wizard can burn through an army of enemy grunts faster than the fighter, or knock down a building, or something equally grandiose, i just want the fighter to be good at what he is trying to do.

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Totally agree, I just dont think super-powers are the only answer.

Give a fighter 2E saves, 4E marking, 5E action surge and legendary resistance. Make sword and board and dual wield better (say by letting dual wield move and attack and not treating the off hand weapon as light and maong shields give univeral DR and energy resistance equal to steength bonus), give them a bonus feat every level i stead of every other, give them 4 or 6 plus int skills a level, make weapon / armor / shield focus / specialization / mastery feats baseline class features, and make the spellbreaker feats from complete arcane core and capable of damaging feee standing illusions and force effects.

Maybe also improve archery for when they cant reach their target and make power attack work retroactively so you receive bonus damage for exceeding the target's AC, or go really crazy and replace iterative attacks with 5e style bonus attacks.

Oh, and for the love of jebus, give them spot, listen, and search as class skills (plus maybe balance and a few others).

That's my napkin math fighter fix which should be able to hang with CoDzilla or ToB classes without any super powers. Still cant touch a full caster who is determined to break the game, but what can?

A couple things:

1. As AntiAuthority pointed out in the OP, like a Fighter, a Wizard also does not make use of a particular power source to fuel their spells - they just study magical scriptures and learn how to manipulate reality with magic with no need for tapping into leylines, an innate magical energy or anything like that. So the only notable difference is that a Wizard produces useful results and the Fighter simply doesn't.

2. The truth is that most HP-reducing abilities do assume a strong direct hit - that's why the strength (and to an extent the size) of the attacker is applied to the damage, injury poisons trigger and other things like a Monk precisely hitting a target such that they're rendered stunned. Any interpretation of luck, grit, near-misses, scrapes etc. is just being in denial that D&D doesn't bother making a realistic damage scaling in favor of things being just absurdly durable.

3. Linked to the above, many assumptions and claims made by the designers flat-out fail to hold up in practice. There's the HP thing I described above, the well-known Martial/Caster gap, high level characters being more than "just a guy"...

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

Totally agree, I just dont think super-powers are the only answer.

Give a fighter 2E saves, 4E marking, 5E action surge and legendary resistance. Make sword and board and dual wield better (say by letting dual wield move and attack and not treating the off hand weapon as light and maong shields give univeral DR and energy resistance equal to steength bonus), give them a bonus feat every level i stead of every other, give them 4 or 6 plus int skills a level, make weapon / armor / shield focus / specialization / mastery feats baseline class features, and make the spellbreaker feats from complete arcane core and capable of damaging feee standing illusions and force effects.

Maybe also improve archery for when they cant reach their target and make power attack work retroactively so you receive bonus damage for exceeding the target's AC, or go really crazy and replace iterative attacks with 5e style bonus attacks.

Oh, and for the love of jebus, give them spot, listen, and search as class skills (plus maybe balance and a few others).

That's my napkin math fighter fix which should be able to hang with CoDzilla or ToB classes without any super powers. Still cant touch a full caster who is determined to break the game, but what can?

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I was talking about this on another forum, but even without any explicitly magical abilities, a level 20 already has super powers. Assuming that they use their ASI's on str or con and started with an 18 in one of those two stats, theyre already either superhumanly strong or superhumanly healthy/durable. And that's not even getting into the fact that they can walk off a fall from the upper atmosphere.

Any level 20 character is super, even if they aren't a spellcaster, because that's just the nature of high level campaigns. And i don't think that's a problem, except that 3.5 seems weirdly determined to not acknowledge that fact for martials. Whats the problem with a fighter blocking a red dragon's breath weapon with their shield? At least with respects to their own person. He's the legendary Fighter Man, let his shield act like a solid barrier. Let him stick a ton of javelins with magic rope attached to a dragon and tether it to the ground that way. If we stop trying to make the fighter look like Just A Guy and allow that he defies the laws of physics as much as a spellcaster does, the game becomes better for him and, dare i say, more fun for his player.

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Originally Posted by Keltest

I was talking about this on another forum, but even without any explicitly magical abilities, a level 20 already has super powers. Assuming that they use their ASI's on str or con and started with an 18 in one of those two stats, theyre already either superhumanly strong or superhumanly healthy/durable. And that's not even getting into the fact that they can walk off a fall from the upper atmosphere.

Any level 20 character is super, even if they aren't a spellcaster, because that's just the nature of high level campaigns. And i don't think that's a problem, except that 3.5 seems weirdly determined to not acknowledge that fact for martials. Whats the problem with a fighter blocking a red dragon's breath weapon with their shield? At least with respects to their own person. He's the legendary Fighter Man, let his shield act like a solid barrier. Let him stick a ton of javelins with magic rope attached to a dragon and tether it to the ground that way. If we stop trying to make the fighter look like Just A Guy and allow that he defies the laws of physics as much as a spellcaster does, the game becomes better for him and, dare i say, more fun for his player.

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I just don't see it. For example, the weight lifting chart in the 3.5 PHB roughly matches up to real life records at about a 23 strength. Also, a level 20 character isn't really representing a real human, they are representing some sort of theoretical human paragon. The fatigue rules don't match real life, but the game doesn't really even try and simulate endurance.

I also don't see anything wrong with allowing a shield to block dragon's fire, assuming the shield is tough enough. Heck, Price Phillip does it in Sleeping Beauty, and he sure isn't a superhero. I even mentioned adding universal energy resistance to a shield as a potential fix in my above list.

Likewise the javelin thing is pretty cool and exactly the sort of game play I am afraid of losing. You wouldn't see that sort of thing if the fighter could just jump onto the dragons back and wrestle it to the ground like the Incredible Hulk. Sometimes making someone more powerful actually reduces fun and creativity.

As an example, in my last campaign, the sorcerer got a magic item that let them cast scorching ray at will without expending a spell slot. It made them much more powerful, but also made the character much more boring to play, to the point where the player in question couldn't wait to retire it. And going back looking through the campaign diary and proofing it for posting, I notice how much more interesting the descriptions of fights involving her are before she got it, where as before she would cast all sorts of varied spells and come up with creative uses for them, afterwards it was simply "she blasted it until it was dead" because that was the optimal strategy. A variant of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," I suppose.

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Originally Posted by Quertus

OK, I couldn't let this one slide - because skills are so expensive in Heroes, and because Batman is so skilled in so many areas, I think that Batman would probably cost more points than, and still be weaker than Superman, if statted up in Heroes.

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The STR score for a basic "brick" character in HERO 4th or 5th would cost enough CP over the "skill-monger's" probable STR to cover 14+ different Skills.

14 Skills covers a LOT of territory in HERO, and that's just the gap on the one Characteristic

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Originally Posted by Quertus

I seem to have lost the QUOTE from you where you explicitly called out running a shadow-bender in Avatar.

So, if they required you (you required them/me) to change the geography of the world, build an entire new continent for a nation of Shadow-benders, that would contradict established canon. I can see that as a bad thing.

But if a new season of Avatar came out, and it was revealed that some bloody giant turtle had, thousands of years ago, on a whim, experimented with new "elements", and created shadow-benders? And that, like the stupid air nomad raiders, they had just "avoided notice" somehow? That would not, IMO, make the setting any less consistent than it already is.

So I say run your shadow-bender, if you can come up with a story that matches the level of "coherence" in Avatar.

Now, iirc, the first time you tried to convince me that HP were an incoherent mess, we went back and forth, because you said "x+Y makes them incoherent", and I showed how that wasn't an issue for me. So repeat with x+Y+z, still not an issue. Finally, once you added in half the alphabet, and I squinted really hard, I conceded that, under that edge case, HP finally broke down. Whatever it was, it didn't really phase me enough to care - HP work just fine 99+% of the time as an abstract game simplification.

Why did I bring up HP? Well, other than because it's in the OP, it's because, despite how much I care about world-building and consistency, even I don't view it as a "100%" thing. I mean, many people may have to aim for 100% just to fail me less at 50% instead of 20%, sure, but, for a game abstraction, I leave a little wiggle room at 99+%. So, much like HP, if you cannot accept a 99+% accuracy rating, then we'll have to accept that we have different preferences. And that some people don't care if coherency is at 1-%.

But, if you disagree with me regarding how incoherent adding Shadow-benders would make the Avatar setting, do you believe that it would be valuable to others in this thread for us to go back and forth, as we did with HP, for you to explain this difference to me?

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I don't know if adding shadow-benders would make the setting incoherent, it would depend on how it was done. Toff creating metal-bending didn't violate the already-established rules because of the details of how she did it, and the consequences were followed through later, and the hypothetical counter of "very pure metal" included.

The point of bringing up shadow-bending and the other examples wasn't about incoherence, it was about characters who simply don't belong in a campaign or its setting. If the GM says they're running a campaign in the "canon" ATLA/LOK setting, and I agree to play, I can't complain that I can't run a shadow bender, or multi-element bender who isn't the Avatar, or whatever. Maybe I could convince the GM that my rogue airbender figured out that storms don't create lightning from fire, but that would depend on whether you think natural lightning in that world comes from massive displaced charges in stormclouds, or if it's all about fire all the time.

If the GM says they're running a campaign set in quasi-historical Eurasia in 1500, and only limited ritual magic is available, and someone agrees to play in that campaign, they can't complain when they can't run a full-on spellcaster, or an Aisimar.

And to the point of the discussion in this thread... if the GM says "humans in this campaign setting have about the same limits and potential as real-world humans, and can't do extranormal stuff unless they cross the threshold into using supernatural forces and become extranormal"... and someone agrees to play in that campaign... then they have no grounds upon which to insist that their character is absolutely 100% not-extranormal, and at the same time have that character doing extranormal stuff. They'd have to make a choice.

And that's what a lot of "GATGF" instances actually come down to -- a player who wants to play a concept that doesn't fit the campaign's setting, or a concept that doesn't justify the power level they want when it's in the context of the campaign's setting.

The examples given aren't given to show incoherence in the settings, they're to give parallel examples of a player who can't be bothered to read the damn setting summary or campaign guide, and/or who thinks that their character concept and their opinion of fantasy-genre games as "anything goes, don't block my fantasy" trumps everyone else.

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

I just don't see it. For example, the weight lifting chart in the 3.5 PHB roughly matches up to real life records at about a 23 strength. Also, a level 20 character isn't really representing a real human, they are representing some sort of theoretical human paragon. The fatigue rules don't match real life, but the game doesn't really even try and simulate endurance.

I also don't see anything wrong with allowing a shield to block dragon's fire, assuming the shield is tough enough. Heck, Price Phillip does it in Sleeping Beauty, and he sure isn't a superhero. I even mentioned adding universal energy resistance to a shield as a potential fix in my above list.

Likewise the javelin thing is pretty cool and exactly the sort of game play I am afraid of losing. You wouldn't see that sort of thing if the fighter could just jump onto the dragons back and wrestle it to the ground like the Incredible Hulk. Sometimes making someone more powerful actually reduces fun and creativity.

As an example, in my last campaign, the sorcerer got a magic item that let them cast scorching ray at will without expending a spell slot. It made them much more powerful, but also made the character much more boring to play, to the point where the player in question couldn't wait to retire it. And going back looking through the campaign diary and proofing it for posting, I notice how much more interesting the descriptions of fights involving her are before she got it, where as before she would cast all sorts of varied spells and come up with creative uses for them, afterwards it was simply "she blasted it until it was dead" because that was the optimal strategy. A variant of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," I suppose.

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I'd just like to point out that Captain America is exactly the kind of hypothetical human paragon youre talking about, and he's explicitly a superhero. As is Batman. In fact, you could easily make a D&D party just out of pop culture "just a human" superheroes who regularly defy human ability. I don't necessarily need the fighter to become the Hulk, but high level adventures are already so far beyond the realm of the mundane, why are we trying to keep the fighter tied down to this? He doesn't have to have flashy and colorful abilities, but letting him do things beyond the ability of The Guy At The Gym shouldn't be raising any eyebrows either.

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Originally Posted by Keltest

I'd just like to point out that Captain America is exactly the kind of hypothetical human paragon youre talking about, and he's explicitly a superhero. As is Batman. In fact, you could easily make a D&D party just out of pop culture "just a human" superheroes who regularly defy human ability. I don't necessarily need the fighter to become the Hulk, but high level adventures are already so far beyond the realm of the mundane, why are we trying to keep the fighter tied down to this? He doesn't have to have flashy and colorful abilities, but letting him do things beyond the ability of The Guy At The Gym shouldn't be raising any eyebrows either.

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Ok, then we are in total agreement on this. I have been explicitly saying since my first post that "superhero" could apply to someone like Captain America or Batman just as well as it could Thor or The Hulk.

AFAICT "The guy at the gym," is intentionally belittling language by people who want to play more "flashy and over the top" characters to create a false dilemma where there is no middle ground between the kind of character they want to play and some mundane guy.

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

Ok, then we are in total agreement on this. I have been explicitly saying since my first post that "superhero" could apply to someone like Captain America or Batman just as well as it could Thor or The Hulk.

AFAICT "The guy at the gym," is intentionally belittling language by people who want to play more "flashy and over the top" characters to create a false dilemma where there is no middle ground between the kind of character they want to play and some mundane guy.

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I mean, maybe, but Captain America definitely isn't the Guy At The Gym either.

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Originally Posted by Keltest

I mean, maybe, but Captain America definitely isn't the Guy At The Gym either.

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Agreed. Which is why I don't like it when people use the fallacy; (afaik) nobody actually wants to play "The Guy at the Gym," they merely want the option to play more grounded heroes.

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

Ok, then we are in total agreement on this. I have been explicitly saying since my first post that "superhero" could apply to someone like Captain America or Batman just as well as it could Thor or The Hulk.

AFAICT "The guy at the gym," is intentionally belittling language by people who want to play more "flashy and over the top" characters to create a false dilemma where there is no middle ground between the kind of character they want to play and some mundane guy.

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"Superhero" is a sloppy term that doesn't help us narrow down the issue -- it's a genre, not a well-defined power level or character type. The very fact that it includes everyone from Superman and Thor to Wolverine to Captain American to Batman and Black Widow, from literal gods and figurative demigods to street-level detectives and vigilantes, should simply demonstrate that it's not really a helpful terminology here.

A character can be a "superhero" without being "superhuman".

(Never mind that comic books are a TERRIBLE source for determining consistent power levels or useful comparative power levels, most superhero comics are written almost entirely under "because the plot said so" logic regarding abilities and power levels.)

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Originally Posted by Talakeal

Agreed. Which is why I don't like it when people use the fallacy; (afaik) nobody actually wants to play "The Guy at the Gym," they merely want the option to play more grounded heroes.

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The source of the concept of the "Guy at the Gym Fallacy" appears to be here: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...he-Gym-Fallacy Someone correct me if it's older than that. The basic assertion is that gamers, etc, presume that because "Fighters" do things that we can do, they're bound by our limitations, but because "Spellcasters" can do things that we can't do, they're not bound by our limitations. That is, Fighters are bound by what we can't imagine ourselves or anyone we know doing, Mages are bound by what we can imagine them doing. This would be a case of other games putting limits on someone's character because they operate under the fallacy that a Fighter (or similar) cannot be extranormal, and must be bound to "realistic" capability.

The Inverse Guy At The Gym Fallacy, however, is the player who insists that their character is effectively a "normal, if peak ability, human", who has no superhuman powers, no extranormal or supernatural or magic stuff whatsoever... but demands that the character be able to do things that are blatantly impossible for any human in the context of the campaign's setting. Instead of other games putting an unjustified limit on the character, the player of that character is saying "yes, my character is a Guy At The Gym" and then reacting negatively when other players have a perfectly reasonable expectation based on that concept as a self-imposed limitation on the character.

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Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy

"Superhero" is a sloppy term that doesn't help us narrow down the issue -- it's a genre, not a well-defined power level or character type. The very fact that it includes everyone from Superman and Thor to Wolverine to Captain American to Batman and Black Widow, from literal gods and figurative demigods to street-level detectives and vigilantes, should simply demonstrate that it's not really a helpful terminology here.

A character can be a "superhero" without being "superhuman".

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Agreed. I think this sloppy terminology was the source of the disagreement between me and the OP earlier in the thread when I said that the term "superhero" being used to describe a level 8 fighter in AD&D doesn't necessarily imply super powers but I also used "superhero setting" as shorthand for the genre of high powered wackiness found in comic book universes like Marvel and DC.