What do you think a Fighter should be?

[Seerow]

It's a functional difference in play; it has nothing to do with what I've been saying. It means you have to read a paragraph of text that says what you can do, and it means you're doing something other than just attacking every turn. Thusly, it's like a spell, and unlike being a fighter.

Doing something other than each turn is not casting spells. I already went over this in my last post.

I don't even care whether he's effective, but you can't build even an incompetent wizard without reading the spells. Even the spells you have no intention of ever taking; you have to read them to find that out!

Huh? There's like 3000 spells out there. You don't need to read them all to play a Wizard. You might need to do so optimally. But a wizard doesn't need to be optimal to be effective. You can look at the general list, pick something that sounds good and use it, and 99% of the time you'll be more effective than the Fighter.

I've never read most of the wizard spells and am constantly mystified by what they're capable of; the same condition could have been created by not writing ANY spells for them and just letting them do whatever they want with a wave of their hand. It's just too much. I'm fine with reading a few pages of text, to create a character - not a novel's worth, which is a different novel for every character, and you have to re-read it every time you play that character so that you know what they, and not some other one of the same class, is capable of. It's okay sometimes, but the more classes can avoid it, the better.

Okay so if you admit you don't know how wizards are played, or even what they're capable of, why are you bothering with this argument? You can have your own playstyle where you ignore the majority of the game, but it makes your experience so drastically removed from the normal game, that your input is basically irrelevant.

Except wear heavy armor.

Why would he want to? He can get better AC than the guy in heavy armor without taking the penalties that heavy armor comes with. Or he can ignore AC and get better defenses like DR/ER, miss chances, etc.

You'll be murdered horribly at the earliest levels if you don't have a fighter watching your back. And do you think he'll do that if he knows you plan to obsolete him?

It's not the Wizard planning to obsolete the Fighter, it's the Fighter becomes incapable of keeping up. There is a difference. It isn't the Wizard's fault that the Fighter becomes more useless as you level.

And seriously, you don't need a Fighter, even at low levels. I've played plenty of campaigns with a caster as the main front liner even from level 1. And if you do have a Fighter, nothing prevents that fighter from branching out and going Gish to keep up. A level or 2 of Fighter is generally a good idea for a gish build.

The inevitable consequence of this "tierist" attitude is that your only options are a low-magic burn-the-witch setting or a Tippyverse. To get anything else, you have to stop thinking this way and accept that the two are REQUIRED to be equal, no matter how much you have to bend the rules to make it happen. Give the fighter the Devil's own luck, so every coincidence works in his favor ("your sword slides off Lord Bloodmace's armor without effect, but just as the tip hits the wall, it strikes a spark which sets the Dark Scroll aflame, and he howls in rage at the knowledge that even if you die, you have won"), and spontaneously nerf the wizard's spells with every excuse you can come up with ("you used too much eye of newt, so the divination comes in 5000% color saturation and you'll have a migraine for the next week"). Done correctly, it comes out looking like fortune favors the bold while making magic seem mysterious and sophisticated, so that the spellcaster still has incredible cool factor for being able to master it at all, even if it's nowhere near as effective as the theory indicates it should be.

GM fiat, heck yeah!

I agree that for the game to work, Fighters and Wizards should be equal. I want that to be a part of the system, not something you have to rely on the GM to force to happen in play.

There's no reason whatsoever why a fighter can't experiment and be creative in each battle. Use the terrain to your advantage, perform cool stunts, and ask for a circumstance bonus. If the wizard tries to do the same, have him make a Dexterity or Wisdom check not to fumble. If your fighter is boring it's because you're not playing him right. Though admittedly it helps a lot if you introduce some optional rules like hit locations, though these can slow combat to a crawl, which is why they were left out.

So you give Fighters secret class features that aren't written down anywhere to let them keep up. But any attempt to codify them makes it too much work for you to read and you hate it. Seriously are you reading what you are writing here? You make literally no sense.

Actually he gets 4 - normal ones at 1st and 3rd, and bonus at 1st and 2nd. Everyone else just has the 1st and 3rd. 4 feats vs. 2 is huge. 6 feats vs. 3 within the first 6 levels is likewise huge. The progression tapers off after that but I forget by exactly how much.

Once again, you compare class to class. It doesn't matter that the Fighter has 4 feats total, his class gave him 2. That is what you compare with the other classes.

The druid's animal companion isn't a robot, you know...you're supposed to need a Handle Animal check for every single thing it does. The wizard's bonus feat is Scribe Scroll, which lets him spend XP so he'll level up slower, in exchange for slightly mitigating his critical spell shortage. The cleric...okay I'll give you that one. I play clerics as being the buttmonkeys of their gods and thus having an unenviable lifestyle, but absent that they do tend to get out of hand (as do druids, but they at least have limitations, if not the most relevant ones).

Okay so you GM fiat clerics to make them useless, pretend like making a handle animal check is hard, and don't seem to understand how experience gain in 3.5 works (spending a little exp on crafting can actually end with you having more exp if you follow the rules). And seriously 1st level scrolls are literally like 1 exp to craft. Even while not following the rules, you can craft a ton of scrolls and probably never fall behind a level.

Yes, in every case. You don't need to be resistant to fire, you don't need to be able to fly, and you don't need to be able to web up your enemies or make them feel dizzy. You just need to be able to kill your enemies. If they shoot fire at you, have lots of hit points. If they fly, use ranged weapons or jump-attacks or indirect terrain attacks. Inflicting status conditions is not as important as inflicting the "dead" status as quickly as possible. As long as the fighter can deliver the damage, that's all that matters in 4 fights out of 5; the 5th can be against a pixie or a balor or something and the Wizard can have his turn to shine, until then he ought to be a buff-bot if not just a brainiac who sits back and makes comments about what the fighter should be doing, while the fighter actually does it.

So you're saying 4 out of 5 fights are enemies who stand still in melee and do nothing but melee attack? I reitterate, the game you are playing is not D&D 3.5. Seriously look through the monster manual. Very few enemies actually work that way. Past level 5 or so it is the extreme minority.

I doubt your definition of effectiveness. It might be true of RAW but certainly now of how I run my games, and surprise surprise, I consider my way more correct.

You may have more fun with your way, but the game you are playing isn't the game we are all discussing, which makes your input about as valid as me going into a White Wolf discussion and complaining about underpowered fighters.

Possibly 3, possibly more like 6.

On average, 3. Unless your players are rolling weighted dice for hp.

And he's marginally more likely to have a high CON as well, though of course that stat is fairly indispensible for everyone.

The Wizard is actually more likely to have a higher con, because on top of only really needing intelligence, he also has spells that can boost his con and/or just give him more hp/temp hp.

Plus he's more likely to be able to spare a feat for something like Improved Toughness, or even Wild Talent and Psionic Body (poor man's psychic warrior, without needing to shop the powers list; it's not a great payoff but combined with the right psionic feats it could be fun in a mid- to high-level game).

Yes because that's what the Fighter should be spending his feats on. More hp.

If you want to run games which have insanely high lethality rates, take six hours to get through 120 seconds of combat,

120 seconds of combat? Combat in 3.5 doesn't last 20 rounds, ever. Most combats run about 2-5 rounds, and generally takes 30-60 minutes. My group typically gets through 3-4 encounters in a session, while taking on higher CR encounters.

As for extremely high lethality rates, lethality is a bit higher, but high CR doesn't mean instant TPK unless your group's baseline effectiveness is a core only fighter. I think in the last year the closest we've come to a TPK was one encounter that had 3/4 party members down. We frequently have one or two party members disabled, but lethality isn't a frequent issue as you imply.

and completely contradict the fictional and mythological underpinnings of their source material, be my guest.

In mythology Fighters are typically superhuman and capable of doing things they can't even dream of in 3.5. That's part of the problem. Yes Fighters becoming useless is bad. The way to fix that isn't to ignore that Fighters are useless and continue as is, it's to bring the Fighters up to the power of mythological warriors and let them do amazing things. You can't rely on GM fiat to fix the game.

I like having a game where the resonant essence of fantasy is clearly visible, where combat flows quickly and efficiently with minimal required reading, and where players' effort building characters is not wasted because 4 out of the 12 kobolds managed to roll critical hits. I'm here to tell a story and to play a game, not to study for a test and make my players feel like they wasted a piece of their life they'll never get back.

Have you considered playing a game that's actually made to be rules light rather than intentionally gimping half the classes of the game because you hate reading?