Tier System

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

All three posts say: "your game is fine, but the way you're interpreting the system is wrong."

How you're getting "my game is wrong" out of that I'll never know.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

{Scrubbed}

How can anyone think your play style is wrong when you won't say what it is, other than saying that the Tier System doesn't apply to it?

Please, tell us what your play style is. List the rules and methods by which you play. Please include any house rules or homebrew or 'gentleman's agreements' which are included at your table.

[Menteith]

{Scrubbed}

[Togo]

Well then, let's propose an example, shall we?

The Wizard shall be fairly low optimization and the Fighter shall be a fairly high optimization, and see what the results are.

The Wizard will be primarily a blastomancer, using only core materials. He will explicitly not be using any metamagic reduction, or any spell which inflicts a condition which prevents his opponent from functioning.

The Fighter will be an Ubercharger with damage capability in the thousands per round.

Who will win? The wizard. Every time. Why? You can't kill what you can't reach. As low as level 3 (Level 1 with a well known early entry cheese feat, but we're sticking to Core here), the Wizard has Levitate to bring himself out of reach, and can then rain death and destruction down on the Fighter with impunity.

Your 'optimised' 3rd level fighter doesn't even have a missle weapon?

The combat assumes a character driven by spells per day has no such limit?

And your measure of worth is whether two characters can kill eachother in an arena duel?

And you're aware that one can agree that wizards are more powerful than fighters without embracing the whole tier system? What point are you trying to make here?

[Sucrose]

{Scrubbed}

I never said that your playstyle was wrong. I said that it required additional steps for it to possibly work within the rules as written. I take similar steps myself, since I don't particularly like massively high-magic settings, preferring at maximum something akin to Eberron. You are shockingly bothered by the implication that 3.5's rules might not work precisely as intended, given that it casts no particular aspersions on your character.

[The Random NPC]

And you're aware that one can agree that wizards are more powerful than fighters without embracing the whole tier system? What point are you trying to make here?

How? That is literally all the tier system says.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Your 'optimised' 3rd level fighter doesn't even have a missle weapon?

Here's the problem with a missile weapon... they suck.

An Ubercharger can easily deal thousands of damage... in melee. But you can't power attack stack with a bow. In which case the Fighter gets out DPR'd (Damage Per Round), and the Wizard either uses Entropic Warding or Wind Wall to shut him down.

The combat assumes a character driven by spells per day has no such limit?

No, the combat assumes a character driven by spells per day has enough spells to end the combat decisively. Without using consumables like wands or scrolls. Easily.

And your measure of worth is whether two characters can kill eachother in an arena duel?

I was trying to be fair to the Fighter. It's the one environment which caters to Fighter's every single strength and minimizes their disadvantages. In every other situation, a Fighter never gets a chance to even act. At least this way, he's got a chance of winning initiative and get one round to do something in.

And you're aware that one can agree that wizards are more powerful than fighters without embracing the whole tier system? What point are you trying to make here?

You realize that the whole tier system amounts to 'wizards are more powerful than fighters'? Well... 'full casters are more powerful than mundane classes', anyways.

You still have yet to describe your play style which yields these results.

[Madara]

Here's the problem with a missile weapon... they suck.

An Ubercharger can easily deal thousands of damage... in melee. But you can't power attack stack with a bow. In which case the Fighter gets out DPR'd (Damage Per Round), and the Wizard either uses Entropic Warding or Wind Wall to shut him down.

Not to mention the amount of feats to burn in order to be a viable archer. A normal fighter certainly could have a ranged weapon with them, but without the proper feats, you get a -4 penalty to hit. At most you could do like 11 damage. Plus, its not even working off of the fighter's primary stat, strength.

[Togo]

{Scrubbed}

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

What changes, if any, do you make to RAW?

What limits, if any, do you place on characters?

What role, if any, do you as the DM play in determining what a character does and does not have access to?

[Menteith]

{Scrubbed}

[GenghisDon]

[QUOTE=Flickerdart;13643976]What? I do not parse this sentence.

I believe you made the claim wands were so much more efficient that wondrous item X can't compete. So now character X can use wands et all.

Right. Because the 36 Intelligence being who can conjure food, energy and servants from thin air is going to have logistical problems. Keep dreaming.

Yep, although if your fortress is a big empty house with nothing but some magical constructs/undead/bound outsiders...well, I'm sure that's a grand ole place. We are obviously talking about apples vs oranges. I'm talking about a place of temporal power & influence hub, apparently you are speaking about a hiding place.

None of them have the ability to conjure goods from thin air.

So which is it? Is it impossible to operate like that, or are there already people doing it? You can't have it both ways. Also, if you know any middle class worker who pumps out tons of finely worked iron in a matter of minutes, I'd love to be introduced.

It's certainly not impossible per se, it's just going to be FAR less lucrative than you & many others believe. No doubt some spell chuckers will have attempted such meddling in commodities before. More fools are born every day. The laws of supply & demand aren't negotable however. If 1,000's of spell chuckers are hawking stone, iron or any other ware imaginable, in endless quantities, all that happens is the price of said commodity plummets to nil. Along with economic consequences great & small. Which the spell chuckers will correctly be blamed for.

I'm not even sure what you're arguing here. My point was that you need magic to deal with magic because mundanes are not powerful enough. You're kind of supporting my point here.

words in my mouth much? I never claimed mundanes were powerful, let alone powerful enough for (undefined action). Nor that magic shouldn't be part of the game. Magic that twists a campaign into utter nonsense needs be nipped, however.

These words you are putting in my mouth, they are delicious. Om nom nom.

All in all, your tone is extremely offensive, and your arguments are unsubstantiated. I'll give you 1/10 for effort, and even that's charitable.

whatever. Right back at ya

[Gavinfoxx]

It is when every physical commodity becomes plentiful that an economy of scarcity breaks down entirely, and instead, an economy of plenty (with regards to commodities and goods, at least) takes it's place. Thus other things, like favors, certain types of work which can't be summoned magically, items which are created the old fashioned way, the acknowledgement of peers, etc. etc. becomes an economic resource.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...Je09i8KWw/edit

Assume that any nonmagical item under 25k is too plentiful to be charged for, and any magical item under 15k is too plentiful to be charged for, and huge categories of work and labor are too plentiful to be charged for... how does that change the setting in question?

[Flickerdart]

I believe you made the claim wands were so much more efficient that wondrous item X can't compete. So now character X can use wands et all.

Oh, I see, you're now arguing that if your Fighter dips Cleric, that makes Fighter and Cleric balanced. Seems legit.

Yep, although if your fortress is a big empty house with nothing but some magical constructs/undead/bound outsiders...well, I'm sure that's a grand ole place. We are obviously talking about apples vs oranges. I'm talking about a place of temporal power & influence hub, apparently you are speaking about a hiding place.

Uh, no. My visitors can be served by robots, nubile women and/or plain old invisible force while dining on the finest food they can imagine. All with spells.

It's certainly not impossible per se, it's just going to be FAR less lucrative than you & many others believe. No doubt some spell chuckers will have attempted such meddling in commodities before. More fools are born every day. The laws of supply & demand aren't negotable however. If 1,000's of spell chuckers are hawking stone, iron or any other ware imaginable, in endless quantities, all that happens is the price of said commodity plummets to nil. Along with economic consequences great & small. Which the spell chuckers will correctly be blamed for.

Ok, so skip the middle man and build your fortress out of iron or stone with free labour. Big deal.

words in my mouth much? I never claimed mundanes were powerful, let alone powerful enough for (undefined action). Nor that magic shouldn't be part of the game. Magic that twists a campaign into utter nonsense needs be nipped, however.

Your opinion of what is utter nonsense is passing strange, as are your quote-unquote "arguments" for why it is nonsense.

[Togo]

You are shockingly bothered by the implication that 3.5's rules might not work precisely as intended, given that it casts no particular aspersions on your character.

I haven't mentioned RAI at all.

Ok, I think people are getting a little overexcited.

I've made one fairly uncontrovertial point. That the Tier system does not apply to every game. Some people have gone to great lengths to explain to me that it applies to every game that follows the rules, and that if I don't have the same experience, I must not be following the rules.

I disagree.

The fact that I'm not able to disagree without attracting a great deal of criticism, accusations of ignorance, and lectures about what must and must not be true about my experience, is a bad thing. And it's not unique to this thread. Open up any thread about the inevitability of the Tippyverse, or about almost any topic that compares fighters to wizards, and you'll see the same pattern. It makes us, as a community, look bad. It makes it harder for us to learn new things.

I quite like the Tier system. It just doesn't work all the time, and not just when you change the rules. Change the assumptions around the setting, the availability of non-Core material, the mindset of the players, the tremendous variety of what different groups consider to be 'optimised' and/or 'broken', and you get a different set of results. There's plenty enough variation within that for the Tiers system to start creaking at the seams.

I'm aware that many people here feel, some quite strongly, that a literal interpretation of RAW produces a single gameworld and game experience. I disagree. I disagree because of the huge variation that can be enjoyed without touching the rules at all. But I don't deny the other guy his experience, I dont' try telling him that he was wrong about what happened on his table. I don't tell people they're incapable, or ignorant, or lying.

It's a varied hobby. We should be celebrating that. We should be able to appreciate someone's painstaking analysis of the logical consequences of RAW without trying to claim that the same rules should lead to the same result on every table. We should be able to enjoy differences without explaining them away. We should be able to use the Tier system without worrying about whether it's a rough guideline, an occasional tool, a revealed truth about the system or holy writ.

I'm tired, and I'm getting longwinded, and so I'll call it a night there.

[Menteith]

Good Points

Fair enough. And I'm sorry for jumping down your throat earlier. I'm going to back off from the thread for awhile and let myself cool down.

[GenghisDon]

Well then, let's propose an example, shall we?

The Wizard shall be fairly low optimization and the Fighter shall be a fairly high optimization, and see what the results are.

The Wizard will be primarily a blastomancer, using only core materials. He will explicitly not be using any metamagic reduction, or any spell which inflicts a condition which prevents his opponent from functioning.

The Fighter will be an Ubercharger with damage capability in the thousands per round.

Who will win? The wizard. Every time. Why? You can't kill what you can't reach. As low as level 3 (Level 1 with a well known early entry cheese feat, but we're sticking to Core here), the Wizard has Levitate to bring himself out of reach, and can then rain death and destruction down on the Fighter with impunity. By the time the Fighter gets access to magic items which grant flight, the Wizard has much faster flight as well as teleportation.

To balance the playing field, the wizard would literally have to not only not be 'optimized', but would have to deliberately refuse to use the most basic defenses accessible to him. Heck, even Mirror Image would give the Wizard a decisive advantage over the Fighter.

This is the fundamental dichotomy between casters and mundanes. Casters have access to entirely new dimensions of play which mundanes simply don't have.

The game isn't about fighter vs wizard at all, however. It's more like fighter & wizard vs dragon, vampire or demon.

regardless, you examples are highly biased & irrational (and I love me wizards!). At low level the wizard is often dead right off the intiative die roll. Give him that (slightly cheesey) feat at L1. Whoops, he has to roll to see if levitate works! Failure likely=death. Worse, what if the wizard tried that spell earleir in the day? I have no argument that casters EVENTUALLY dominate (most) games, but it's silly to say it's early in the game.

I also think you inadvertantly hit a problem "optimisers" have with non-casters. Lacking so much flexibility (that spells give), "optimising" a non-caster is actually counter-productive to a great deal of actual play. Apparently your charge monger is so fixated on charging he doesn't even have a bow, throwing weapon(s) or a potion. If you are playing a (non- caster) character up, and keep getting hosed by mobility or (insert tactic), you should adjust your character's responses acordingly, so as to not be a complete loser/waste of paper. That might mean a feat or 2 on missle combat, blind fighting, save enhancer, or spending some $ on gear to help mitigate the problem, rather than the rubbish feat tax for PRC X, the next feat in your line of doom, or the piece of gear that strengthens you where you are already strong. BLASPHEMY! I know.

[GenghisDon]

I never said that your playstyle was wrong. I said that it required additional steps for it to possibly work within the rules as written. I take similar steps myself, since I don't particularly like massively high-magic settings, preferring at maximum something akin to Eberron. You are shockingly bothered by the implication that 3.5's rules might not work precisely as intended, given that it casts no particular aspersions on your character.

LOL, I'm shockingly bothered that anyone could possibly think RAW does work.

Regardless, I am pretty sure I'm with Togo on all this.

[Arundel]

At low level the wizard is often dead right off the intiative die roll.

Why a wizard would be losing initiative is a important question. Dex is arguably the second most important stat for a wizard, so under standard point buys it should be a 14 at least.

Give him that (slightly cheesey) feat at L1. Whoops, he has to roll to see if levitate works! Failure likely=death.

Ignoring the fact that you just called what I believe is Improved Initiative cheesy, what roll are you making to see if levitate works? I don't see anything like that, and if you are first in order then its not a contested roll.
Reference:

Spoiler

Show

Transmutation
Level: Sor/Wiz 2
Components: V, S, F
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Personal or close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: You or one willing creature or one object (total weight up to 100 lb./level)
Duration: 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No
Levitate allows you to move yourself, another creature, or an object up and down as you wish. A creature must be willing to be levitated, and an object must be unattended or possessed by a willing creature. You can mentally direct the recipient to move up or down as much as 20 feet each round; doing so is a move action. You cannot move the recipient horizontally, but the recipient could clamber along the face of a cliff, for example, or push against a ceiling to move laterally (generally at half its base land speed).

A levitating creature that attacks with a melee or ranged weapon finds itself increasingly unstable; the first attack has a -1 penalty on attack rolls, the second -2, and so on, to a maximum penalty of -5. A full round spent stabilizing allows the creature to begin again at -1.

Focus
Either a small leather loop or a piece of golden wire bent into a cup shape with a long shank on one end.

I also think you inadvertantly hit a problem "optimisers" have with non-casters. Lacking so much flexibility (that spells give), "optimising" a non-caster is actually counter-productive to a great deal of actual play. Apparently your charge monger is so fixated on charging he doesn't even have a bow, throwing weapon(s) or a potion. If you are playing a (non- caster) character up, and keep getting hosed by mobility or (insert tactic), you should adjust your character's responses acordingly, so as to not be a complete loser/waste of paper. That might mean a feat or 2 on missle combat, blind fighting, save enhancer, or spending some $ on gear to help mitigate the problem, rather than the rubbish feat tax for PRC X, the next feat in your line of doom, or the piece of gear that strengthens you where you are already strong. BLASPHEMY! I know.

I am really struggling with what you are trying to say here, but I think you're arguing against specializing low tier classes. The only reason a ubercharger is remotely competitive is because they have that entire feat train. This well rounded fighter you seem to be proposing simply sucks at everything as opposed to being good at even a single thing.

[The Glyphstone]

Great Modthulhu: Locked for review.