What do you think a Fighter should be?

[rockdeworld]

IHumans can't realistically do that kinda stuff. But John McClain and high level Fighters can.

I think the point was that John McClain can't meaningfully harm a level 10 wizard/cleric/druid. Monks can be hard to kill too, yet their lack of damage ability makes them a less desirable class choice.

As for me, I play D&D partly because of the d20srd, partly because my friends play it.

[BootStrapTommy]

Right here? These quotes more or less encapsulate the "fighters do not get nice things" mentality I'd like to finally abandon.

I have lost all respect for the "because MAGIC!" approach to D&D classes. If we can't stretch our imaginations to encapsulate near-mystical feats of arms and give Fighters similar degrees of player fiat to that which spellcasters enjoy, I don't see the point of having mundane characters at all.

-O

I respond to your criticism of my statement by pointing out that you are taking me out of context and pointing you in the direction of my previous comment for the proper context.

In Live Free and Die Hard, John McClain does almost nothing but "near-mystical feats of arms". Assuming you look far enough past the explosions and corny dialogue to see the ridiculousness contained within it.

We westerners have been completely duped by Hollywood into believing that superhuman feats are normal. The heroes in our literature and other media do them all the time. But people can't actually do that kinda of stuff. The one man cannot win in a shootout against 10 other guys. You cannot jump onto a harrier. You cannot fire a handgun with one hand accurately, especially sideways.

Fighters pulling off this stuff ARE performing "near-mystical feats of arms". And fighters are capable of so much more as well.

[BootStrapTommy]

I think the point was that John McClain can't meaningfully harm a level 10 wizard/cleric/druid. Monks can be hard to kill too, yet their lack of damage ability makes them a less desirable class choice.

As for me, I play D&D partly because of the d20srd, partly because my friends play it.

If a good enough ranger can sneak an arrow through a lvl 10 wizard, than John McClain could sneak a bullet through.

[Ashtagon]

Nothing really. If it's corporeal, it can get around him and attack his friends. If it's not, he can't hit it anyway. If a level 3 fighter is left in an empty room with an Allip, he'll die 98% of the time (the other 2% have a ghost touch weapon and rolled well on their 50% miss chances, will saves, and got lucky against the wisdom drain). In a party, the frontline fighter ideally wants to stop enemies from attacking his allies and give the rogue flanking, whereas the ranged or striker fighter wants to deal a lot of damage. The problem is, there's about 1 good build for the former (Saph's horizon tripper), and nothing in core for the latter. In most games now the fighter dude has "taunt" which makes enemies attack him. D&D fighters don't.

Well yeah. Right now as per RAW, the fighter dies to anything not mundane. Hit him with an energy drain or an incorporeal attack or a wall of force or an incorporeal attack, and he says "OWW".

He should be able to wave his finger and softly say, "not today".

[kardar233]

If a good enough ranger can sneak an arrow through a lvl 10 wizard, than John McClain could sneak a bullet through.

But... they can't.

I respond to your criticism of my statement by pointing out that you are taking me out of context and pointing you in the direction of my previous comment for the proper context.

In Live Free and Die Hard, John McClain does almost nothing but "near-mystical feats of arms". Assuming you look far enough past the explosions and corny dialogue to see the ridiculousness contained within it.

We westerners have been completely duped by Hollywood into believing that superhuman feats are normal. The heroes in our literature and other media do them all the time. But people can't actually do that kinda of stuff. The one man cannot win in a shootout against 10 other guys. You cannot jump onto a harrier. You cannot fire a handgun with one hand accurately, especially sideways.

Fighters pulling off this stuff ARE performing "near-mystical feats of arms". And fighters are capable of so much more as well.

Yeah... these "near-mystical feats of arms" you're talking about? They're not nearly enough in a D&D context. Sure, being able to win a shootout against 10 men is pretty cool. But when you're dealing with flying, teleporting, telekinetic incarnations of evil, your ability to win a gunfight against 10 men is looking a little shabby.

Being able to beat 10 men with equivalent equipment is something that Fighters should be doing by 6th level. Not 20th.

[Zeful]

In Live Free and Die Hard, there are at least 11 instances where John McClain SHOULD die where he does NOT. It's not that he almost dies. Not that he gets injured or that he endures the pain. Just that he does SOMETHING which a human being could not physically do and also continue living. He rides on top of a HARRIER, for the sake of the one big thing up in that high place!!! I thoroughly argue that your statement with regards to lvl 10 wizards thoroughly underestimates the badassness of John McClain. Probably because you were not paying attention to how RIDICULOUS everything in that movie is. Humans can't realistically do that kinda stuff. But John McClain and high level Fighters can.

And? He has no feats in that movie, or for that matter in any of the franchise, that would be capable of meaningfully threatening a 10th level wizard. No inhuman accuracy or strength, no incredible fighting capability, just excessive endurance. A character who's only defined by his ability to receive and survive damage is not a threat, they can't be. A high level fighter, when they take the field should not only be hard to kill, but also be a threat to all who oppose him, and it shouldn't be because his weapon does all the work for him, but because he's so skilled with weapons that his sword can be broken into a thousand pieces and his opponents haven't eliminated the threat he represents. We're talking someone who jumps from the battlements of a tower to get to the battle faster and isn't notably impaired by a 100+ foot drop. This is well beyond John McClain.

[BootStrapTommy]

And? He has no feats in that movie, or for that matter in any of the franchise, that would be capable of meaningfully threatening a 10th level wizard. No inhuman accuracy or strength, no incredible fighting capability, just excessive endurance. A character who's only defined by his ability to receive and survive damage is not a threat, they can't be. A high level fighter, when they take the field should not only be hard to kill, but also be a threat to all who oppose him, and it shouldn't be because his weapon does all the work for him, but because he's so skilled with weapons that his sword can be broken into a thousand pieces and his opponents haven't eliminated the threat he represents. We're talking someone who jumps from the battlements of a tower to get to the battle faster and isn't notably impaired by a 100+ foot drop. This is well beyond John McClain.

You, my friend, have clearly never actually seen Live Free or Die Hard.
You just describe John McClain and then went "This is well beyond John McClain".

He does a number of things comparable to jumping "from the battlements of a tower to get to the battle faster and isn't notably impaired by a 100+ foot drop." He jumps onto a Harrier, kills the pilot and survives, noticeably unimpaired, the landing (if you could call it a "landing"). Furthermore, his ingenuity in the movies almost make him a BIGGER threat unarmed. You seem to have missed the point that everything that John McClain does in any of the movies, especially the fourth, are awfully close to impossible and damn well superhuman. Yet you're dismissing it.

McClain would squash the lvl 10 wizard.

Your problem is exactly as I stated above. You seem to thinks that action heroes are capable of even a portion of what media portrays them as capable of. Humans aren't capable of doing what most action heroes do. There is something fantastic that they do. Somethings even a wizard of almost deity-like power still cannot do without magic.

[BootStrapTommy]

But... they can't.

I've built tenth level Deepwood Snipers which can drop wizards of equal level in one shot. Don't tell me they can't.

[willpell]

The only downside is learning a whole new system, and leaving your assumptions at the door.

That's nothing BUT downside. You might as well suggest that a person who thinks they aren't good-looking enough cut off their head and staple a prettier one on.

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.

Not at all. The topic of this thread is not "How do you build a good Fighter under 3.5 rules", at which I admit my input would be worth very level. This thread is "What do you think the Fighter should be", and my answer is apparently "the focal point around which all of the D&D rules are bent, folded, spindled and mutilated to make him the ideal balance metric".

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.

A high enough AC means you CAN'T be hit AT ALL except on criticals. That's a lot better than even a 50% miss chance. Damage Reduction is nice if you can get a lot of it, but 3.5 capped it at only 15 and more usually 5 or 10, so it's difficult to make it more than a cushion. And Energy Resistance only matters if your opponents attack with fire, acid, or magic.

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.

It absolutely is. The Fighter is the mundane, normal, human(oid), nothing-but-the-facts-ma'am class. He is the absolute peak and epitome of what the Commoner can realistically wish he could become. Everyone else is breaking the rules of physics, toadying up to extraplanar entities or forces of nature, or otherwise cheating at the (metaphorical) game that the fighter excels in as long as nobody deviates from the norm.

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.

Almost certainly the methods you used would be cheese by my definition and I'd forbid them. It is flat-out impossible for a standard wizard 1 build to stand on the front lines for more than a few minutes a day without dying. His spells last for between 1 round and 1 minute, he has only a fistful of them, and his d4 hit die combined with any amount of CON and DEX is not enough to survive for long against a series of CR 1 encounters with 4 rats or 3 goblins or 2 orcs.

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.

Leaving aside my scathing hatred for that term, a character who multiclasses to wizard in order to become a battlemage of some sort stops being a fighter. He has changed into a completely different archetype, and that's a roleplay decision; it means you've given up on being a fighter and don't want to play one anymore, just as if your cleric abandoned his god or your paladin Fell to evil.

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.

The GM always has to force it to happen, since it's not inherent in RAW. The "in play" part is not 100% necessary, but it takes an AWFUL lot of advance planning to work out all the issues and houserule them; it's far easier if you treat the game as a never-ending betatest and constantly patch your rules in response to situations your players discover.

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.

Exactly. The gameplay experience should flow naturally in the moment, like improv, instead of forcing you to study and memorize your "lines".

pretend like making a handle animal check is hard

It's having to roll one more die every G-D turn on top of all the existing rolls, so yeah. And if you get a "1" the GM is fully within his rights to have the animal do the absolute worst possible thing as its instincts take over.

So you're saying 4 out of 5 fights are enemies who stand still in melee and do nothing but melee attack?

Such enemies are the default, yes; exceptions should be rare.

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

"Average" means anything only if you are taking it instead of rolling. Dice will NEVER do what you expect them to.

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

Since his main party role is generally "meat shield", yes.

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.

I may have exagerrated a bit for the sake of drama.

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.

Even one player-character death is a serious problem, unless the cleric can cast resurrection and isn't the one who died. There are no guarantees that an NPC resurrecter can be found, can be afforded/persuaded, or even exists. The revolving door afterlife is NOT something players can count on.

So: You don't want to read a paragraph of text for some ability, yet for some reason you want to play D&D, a game where the core rules are about a thousand pages and a good five hundred pages over most other rules heavy systems (though I think HERO is longer). The obvious solution here is just to pick a game which isn't built to be incredibly rules heavy, such as basically the rest of the industry, including several games that do D&D style gameplay just as well as D&D.

Those games cannot have Beholders and Yuan-Ti in them because those things are Wizards product identity. Sure I could do homemade conversions but that would be even MORE work than dealing with D&D. So I'm stuck.

Firstly, there is no reason that every other class in the game can't do the same thing, which means that calling this an advantage of the Fighter is disenguous.

It doesn't matter if everyone can do it, if only the Fighter can do it well. (Whether that's actually true I'm not sure since I don't remember what this is in reference to, but in general fighter-types are better at things that everyone can do, while wizard-types suck at the normal options but have access to abnormal ones.)

"rocket tag", where the borderline between down and completely dead is generally tiny

Nice way to think of it.

You're complaining about a game built exactly against your specifications in every way not working with your specifications well. It's like pulling a romance book off the shelf and then complaining when there isn't enough action.

Maybe that romance book had a great-looking cover picture and I was suckered into buying it, and now I'm cheesed that it doesn't deliver what it promised. That rather parallels the D&D situation, both with reference to the fighter and more generally. The exact same rules that D&D has now could have been more user-friendly if they'd just been organized differently, to say nothing of actually changing them to better deliver the experience that they're supposed to. But instead of fixing what they have now, so that their existing customers will get their money's worth, they constantly throw out new editions as a cash-grab. This is how business always works and is exactly why I am fiercely anti-business.

Nothing really. If it's corporeal, it can get around him and attack his friends. If it's not, he can't hit it anyway. If a level 3 fighter is left in an empty room with an Allip, he'll die 98% of the time (the other 2% have a ghost touch weapon and rolled well on their 50% miss chances, will saves, and got lucky against the wisdom drain).

A ghost isn't something a fighter should be able to deal with; that's what he needs a Cleric buddy for. I said 4 out of 5 earlier but that was inaccurate; the Fighter actually only needs to be good in 2 out of 5 fights, because the average party is 4 members. Every 5 fights should typically contain 1 fighter fight, 1 wizard fight, 1 cleric fight, 1 skillmonkey fight, and 1 fight that challenges the entire group. In that last fight, the fighter plays an absolutely critical role keeping enemies from getting past him so that he can keep his companions alive while they lob artillery and buff him and heal him and point out weak spots for his benefit (note to self: sneak attack should be transferrable). So every character is critical 2/5 of the time, and the entire party is critical 5/5. That is the ideal we should shoot for.

In most games now the fighter dude has "taunt" which makes enemies attack him. D&D fighters don't.

If the GM is running the enemies with a modicum of common sense (instead of meta-knowledge of the game system's flaws which they shouldn't have unless they're wizards or bards or something), they should not be waltzing past the fighter and absorbing one AoO while otherwise ignoring him because he's known to be useless. He should automatically be their focus just because he's closer and most visibly dangerous. This doesn't need to be a game mechanic; it's just how it should inherently work. A sane orc does not turn his back on a human fighter in order to cut down the puny human with the spectacles and the walking stick; the orc "knows" that the human who meets him on the same field of battle is the real threat, and will not survive to learn otherwise. A few canny opponents should disobey this unwritten rule, but it should be in effect most of the time.

And the problems of the fighter at mid- and high-levels are as follows:
Invisible enemies - No core magic item can deal with this, you either have to have the right splatbook (although MIC is pretty common) and pay for the item (Blindfold of True Seeing), or get a wizard to cast a spell on you.
Incorporeal enemies - You often don't have the money or room to pay for Ghost Touch on your magic sword.
Flying enemies - it's one thing when you're looking up at a dragon dropping rocks on you from 300 feet in the air, it's another thing when you've gotta take out your bow to deal with a manticore using Flyby Attack to swoop in and then fly up ten feet above you.

As I said before, incorporeal should leave the fighter useless. Invisible and flying should make things difficult, but not impossible. "Hearing the air" and "jumping attack" do not need to be Tome of Battle maneuvers; they are things that anyone could do, and the DM just needs to figure out what the DC of that perception check to hear the pixie's wings whoosh should be, or how much of a penalty to apply to a Charge attack which includes a Jump check to get off the ground (breaking the normal rules for charging, but the DM has every right to allow that if it seems appopriate).

[Kane0]

Mechanics aside, I reckon the fighter is a versatile mix of:
- Expert tactician, much like swashbucklers and some rogues
- Intensely trained or otherwise dedicated warrior, similar to monks
- Inspirational leader, like paladins (we homebrewed them to be 'Champions' instead to allow more than just LG) or knights
- Formidable meatshield, like Barbarians
- Cunning hunter and killer, akin to a ranger
-Edit: Veteran soldier, as stated below

So the fighter is the balancing point between all of the other martial classes, which each take an aspect to its extreme.

[willpell]

You forgot "trained and decorated veteran soldier in his nation's army", which doesn't fit any of those archetypes and is pretty much exclusively a Fighter concept. Although, the guy who mentioned before that a level 1 Fighter should be a veteran must not have looked at the suggested starting ages by class - a level 1 Fighter is like 17.

[jaybird]

Humans can't realistically do that kinda stuff. But John McClain and high level Warblades can.

Fixed that for you.

Things that humans physically can't do? Sure sounds like an (Ex) maneuver to me. Notice that Diamond Mind, Iron Heart, Stone Dragon, and (I think) White Raven and Tiger Claw, are all (Ex) schools, meaning they are not magical.

Exactly. The gameplay experience should flow naturally in the moment, like improv, instead of forcing you to study and memorize your "lines".

Then WHY ARE YOU PLAYING ONE OF THE CRUNCHIEST GAMES KNOWN TO MAN?

[Jacob.Tyr]

Been thinking about it, and I like the idea of the fighter being the paragon of the mundane. But instead of this being about him as an apt user of mundane weaponry, why not have it be about him being so ungodly ground in the mundane world that every weapon he uses becomes mundane, every enemy he strikes loses part of it's magic, ever magical weapon that is brought down against him turns mundane as it strikes his armor?

Level 1: A fairly apt soldier, trained in many styles with many weapons. Far more than conscripted militia, yet not worth writing about.

Level 5: Amazing soldier, capable of turning the tides of an entire mundane battle by shear virtue of his training, strength, and any other applicable stats you've not dumped. Might swing a magical sword, doesn't really think twice about it being magical but still benefits entirely.

Level 10: Starting to become so grounded in the material plane that magical abilities stop affecting him. Gains SR, magical touch attacks stop counting as touch attacks and instead become slightly more mundane around him.
Blocks spells as though they were just mundane means of dealing damage. Treats mage armor as he would any other armor not made of metal, leather, or even cloth. I.E. doesn't even notice it's there.

Level 15: His grounding in the material world starts affecting those around him. Higher SR, maybe antimagic sphere x/day. His attacks also carry some portion of this grounding with them.
Dragon flying overhead using supernatural flight? He knocks an arrow, aims, and fires it with such conviction in the laws of physics and the material plane (Without ever even realizing this, it's more of just him having such a strong idea as to what makes sense, action/reaction), that it takes flight carrying this conviction with it. Although the arrow hits the dragon with little more force than is necessary for it to even know anything happened, this conviction strips it's magical flight and sends it plummeting earthward. Shocked, it attempts to breath and merely manages a to... breath. While the smell of a carnivores breath might be horrible, it doesn't exactly deal any damage to him.
Magical arms and armor around him lose their abilities, flaming swords are extinguished etc. Long enough exposure wipes them out permanently.
Cleaves through your magical defenses with every blow causing them to backlash in your face, walks through force walls and they collapse under the power of the material plane.

Level 20: Magic isn't even a thing he realizes exists anymore. All of those magical weapons he was sold as a youth must have been scams. Antimagic sphere at will, except not really at will, just manages to appear when he encounters something that he knows cannot be.
Walks into a magic shop, is shown an epic artifact sword, picks it up, comments on how brittle and dull it is. Shop keeper is horrified that his +5 keen vorpal flaming sword is now worthless. Shouts, tells the fighter to leave, attempts a volley from a magical repeating crossbow. A single arrow lamely flops out onto the ground in front of him as the magic that powers it is disrupted forever.

At level 20 he could easily take a 20 wizard on, given enough surprise and enough planning. The wizard could also take him, though. Most likely both are sitting in their castles with their retainers, unwilling to risk life/limb to go after the other.

tl;dr By level 5 he is as good as you can get in tripping/disarming/bull rushing/grappling and fighting with a few weapons standard to his unit/school or whatever fluff you wish to use.

Level 10-Spell resistance

Level 15-Disrupts magic with his attacks, magical effects falter around him.

Level 20-Manifested force of the material plane waging war against the interference of outside/arcane/divine forces. Uses mundane weapons only, as they are the only kind that exist in his mind and in his world. If you can't take him with a mundane means, then you'd better kill him in his sleep.

[willpell]

Fixed that for you.

I haven't seen the movie under discussion, but from the quoted post it doesn't sound like anything that a high Hit Point total couldn't do. Fighters are a little behind Warblades in that area, but only a little; the important thing is just the "high level" part.

Then WHY ARE YOU PLAYING ONE OF THE CRUNCHIEST GAMES KNOWN TO MAN?

So that I have the crunch to fall back on if I need it. Roleplaying always comes first, but sometimes I have a player who wants to break down a brick wall with a hammer before the dragon catches him, and I have no idea how many hit points a brick wall has. Voila - tables in the DMG to tell me the HP and hardness of various types of walls. The rules should always provide me with more information and more options; they are not there to tell me I'm not allowed to use my imagination.

[Seerow]

A high enough AC means you CAN'T be hit AT ALL except on criticals. That's a lot better than even a 50% miss chance. Damage Reduction is nice if you can get a lot of it, but 3.5 capped it at only 15 and more usually 5 or 10, so it's difficult to make it more than a cushion. And Energy Resistance only matters if your opponents attack with fire, acid, or magic.

The high enough AC you are talking about isn't something that's easy to obtain. As early as level 10 you have some enemies with attack bonuses at +30 or more. 50 AC at level 10 takes a lot of optimizing. Even 40 takes a fair bit of optimization. The worst part is the Fighter's class features contribute almost nothing to hitting those values. The only benefit heavy armor gives you is not needing as much dexterity for armor class. Full Plate gives you a whopping +1 AC over other armors. You have your Fighter in full plate you have 19 AC. Now you either have to invest almost all of your gold into AC boosting items, or use cheesy tricks, to reach even the "I only get hit 50% of the time mark" much less the "I get hit only on a crit mark". And even if you do successfully manage that? Your touch AC is probably still terrible, and you'll be hit on a 1 with a touch attack. Your Will and Reflex saves are still terrible, and you can still be taken out nearly instantly with a wide variety of spells.

The reason why miss chance is considered superior is because it is reliable. No matter what you are fighting, you get your miss chance. Some enemies it may be worse than a high AC, other enemies it could be better. But it is much easier for the Wizard to obtain (1 spell) and always applies. And the Wizard also has defensive buffs that apply to those other annoying things that can take out the Fighter (save boosts, status effect immunities, etc).

It absolutely is. The Fighter is the mundane, normal, human(oid), nothing-but-the-facts-ma'am class. He is the absolute peak and epitome of what the Commoner can realistically wish he could become. Everyone else is breaking the rules of physics, toadying up to extraplanar entities or forces of nature, or otherwise cheating at the (metaphorical) game that the fighter excels in as long as nobody deviates from the norm.

But the game is all about everybody deviating from the norm. If you try to force everyone down to where the Fighter is, you have a very boring game.

Almost certainly the methods you used would be cheese by my definition and I'd forbid them. It is flat-out impossible for a standard wizard 1 build to stand on the front lines for more than a few minutes a day without dying. His spells last for between 1 round and 1 minute, he has only a fistful of them, and his d4 hit die combined with any amount of CON and DEX is not enough to survive for long against a series of CR 1 encounters with 4 rats or 3 goblins or 2 orcs.

I did specify Caster, not Wizard. Clerics and Druids both have decent armor, d8 hp, and the druid has an animal companion who is as durable as a whole extra fighter at low levels. The Cleric can also choose to pick up Healing Devotion in place of a domain, which is amazing at low level, and adds greatly to durability.

Leaving aside my scathing hatred for that term, a character who multiclasses to wizard in order to become a battlemage of some sort stops being a fighter. He has changed into a completely different archetype, and that's a roleplay decision; it means you've given up on being a fighter and don't want to play one anymore, just as if your cleric abandoned his god or your paladin Fell to evil.

Yet it is the one way to keep up while still using Fighter levels. You're right it's not a mundane Fighter. But it is the way that you start as a Fighter, and still maintain an edge at mid-high levels.

The GM always has to force it to happen, since it's not inherent in RAW. The "in play" part is not 100% necessary, but it takes an AWFUL lot of advance planning to work out all the issues and houserule them; it's far easier if you treat the game as a never-ending betatest and constantly patch your rules in response to situations your players discover.

Sure you can constantly patch it. But when we're talking about "What a Fighter should be", we're asking "What do we want the Fighter to be so we don't have to constantly patch the game to make him vaguely functional?". Warping the powers of plot around the Fighter isn't an answer, and it will piss even more people off than just making the fighter full on supernatural. Continuously houseruling things in favor of the Fighter can be done, but that will lead to hugely different play experiences table to table or even GM to GM. The game should provide a Fighter class that is useful even without the need to houserule constantly.

Exactly. The gameplay experience should flow naturally in the moment, like improv, instead of forcing you to study and memorize your "lines".

Yes we heard you the first 5 times, reading is too hard.

It's having to roll one more die every G-D turn on top of all the existing rolls, so yeah. And if you get a "1" the GM is fully within his rights to have the animal do the absolute worst possible thing as its instincts take over.

Skill checks don't auto fail on a one, and handle animal is a DC10 skill check that is wisdom based. Link gives druids a +4 bonus to handle animal with their animal companion. As long as you stick to tricks that the animal knows (ie don't attempt to "Push") then you literally cannot fail as long as you put skill ranks into handle animal and have a minimum of 12 wisdom. That's why most people don't even bother rolling the check, because they can't fail the check. This sounds like one of your secret houserules to screw the casters to try to make Fighters seem better.

Such enemies are the default, yes; exceptions should be rare.

Once again, this is not D&D.

"Average" means anything only if you are taking it instead of rolling. Dice will NEVER do what you expect them to.

No, but you also can't say "It's going to be a difference of more like 6" because you can't assume that the dice are going to be better to you. When discussing things like this you assume the average because that's what you are statistically likely to expect, even if in some individual cases you can run into other cases. I mean if you want to ignore average I can point out how a Fighter past level 2 or 3 could end up with worse HP than the Wizard because the Fighter can roll all 1s while the Wizard keeps rolling 3s and 4s. Is it likely? No. But that's the sort of thing you can do when you decide to just ignore statistics.

Since his main party role is generally "meat shield", yes.

Even as a meat shield, there are other things that are typically better to invest in to increase survival. This is ignoring the fact that just being a pile of hp makes you completely nonthreatening and thus lets enemies ignore you entirely, making all your hp useless.

I may have exagerrated a bit for the sake of drama.

A bit?

Even one player-character death is a serious problem, unless the cleric can cast resurrection and isn't the one who died. There are no guarantees that an NPC resurrecter can be found, can be afforded/persuaded, or even exists. The revolving door afterlife is NOT something players can count on.

Revolving door afterlife is a part of the game. Losing characters occasionally is also a part of the game. You let your players walk through with easy mode on, fighting only lower level challenges who do nothing but stand in melee with the Fighter and attack, and nobody ever dies, and then can't conceive of why you have a bunch of people telling you that your input is completely invalid.

[jaybird]

I haven't seen the movie under discussion, but from the quoted post it doesn't sound like anything that a high Hit Point total couldn't do. Fighters are a little behind Warblades in that area, but only a little; the important thing is just the "high level" part.

So that I have the crunch to fall back on if I need it. Roleplaying always comes first, but sometimes I have a player who wants to break down a brick wall with a hammer before the dragon catches him, and I have no idea how many hit points a brick wall has. Voila - tables in the DMG to tell me the HP and hardness of various types of walls. The rules should always provide me with more information and more options; they are not there to tell me I'm not allowed to use my imagination.

I haven't seen it either, to be honest if someone could post some of the most outstanding badass scenes in the movie for analysis, that'd be appreciated.


Except the Warblade can do it better. Mountain Hammer - he steadies himself and takes a deep breath, before making a single swing at the wall with a shout, powering his swing with his entire body. That's (Ex) - by definition, it's something non-magical and intrinsic to the owner of the ability, who has attained it through surpassing mortal limits with his own prowess.

[willpell]

The high enough AC you are talking about isn't something that's easy to obtain. As early as level 10 you have some enemies with attack bonuses at +30 or more.

I was thinking more like 25 AC at level 4 (a 3-DEXMOD Bugbear with +1 Breastplate armor and a +1 heavy shield). He was nearly invincible to a platoon of low-level fighters, though they did eventually manage to box him in through sheer numbers and take him down with special combat maneuvers which bypassed his AC.

The reason why miss chance is considered superior is because it is reliable. No matter what you are fighting, you get your miss chance.

There are plenty of ways of bypassing concealment, and I believe True Seeing nukes Blur as well.

But the game is all about everybody deviating from the norm. If you try to force everyone down to where the Fighter is, you have a very boring game.

It doesn't look boring to me. The sheer variety available among fighter bonus feats and basic combat maneuvers alone, with *a* spell thrown in now and again for color, seems like it could entertain me for a very long time. I think the community here is just jaded because they've been playing for like five solid years, probably with a regular playgroup instead of the dribs and drabs of play I've had.

The Cleric can also choose to pick up Healing Devotion in place of a domain, which is amazing at low level, and adds greatly to durability.

News to me. Haven't read those feats except for Knowledge Devotion and a couple random otehrs.

The game should provide a Fighter class that is useful even without the need to houserule constantly.

Well, it should perhaps, but it didn't. And Wotco stuck a fork in it five years ago so we're pretty much stuck. Houserules are all we're ever going to have unless we jump to 5E.

Skill checks don't auto fail on a one, and handle animal is a DC10 skill check that is wisdom based.

It's DC 25 for anything you haven't specifically trained the animal to do, and they can only learn 3-6 tricks plus the bonuses from the druid's level. Though personally even that is more reliability than I think they should have.

This sounds like one of your secret houserules to screw the casters to try to make Fighters seem better.

Yeah, and pretty much everyone agrees the casters are overpowered so how is that a problem exactly? Do you like having Tier 1 classes that crush game balance underfoot like so many twigs?

When discussing things like this you assume the average because that's what you are statistically likely to expect

You, maybe; not me. I've learned long ago that statistics is a trap meant to lull you into a false sense of security so that Chance can punch you in the kidney when you least expect it. So I always hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and echo Han Solo's line about the odds.

This is ignoring the fact that just being a pile of hp makes you completely nonthreatening and thus lets enemies ignore you entirely, making all your hp useless.

Nonsense. You're still whacking them with AoOs as they try to sneak by, and they're not just going to ignore you; you're hurting them and so their ignorant primitive impulse is to hurt you back. You've trained to bear the pain unflinchingly; they haven't.

Revolving door afterlife is a part of the game. Losing characters occasionally is also a part of the game. You let your players walk through with easy mode on, fighting only lower level challenges who do nothing but stand in melee with the Fighter and attack, and nobody ever dies, and then can't conceive of why you have a bunch of people telling you that your input is completely invalid.

They can call it that all they want, but it's not true. My perspective is just as relevant as anyone else's. If they want to ignore it, that's their right, but I'll keep stating my piece and nobody's going to stop me just because they think they have some reason why my opinion doesn't count. That's only their assessment, and they can't stop me from talking to everyone else who hasn't yet come to agree with their dismissiveness.

[toapat]

I haven't seen the movie under discussion, but from the quoted post it doesn't sound like anything that a high Hit Point total couldn't do. Fighters are a little behind Warblades in that area, but only a little; the important thing is just the "high level" part.

To sumurize everything you need to know about bruce willis in Live Free or Die Hard:

"You just took out a Helicopter with a car!?!"
"I was out of bullets"

a Car has a -16 non-proficiency penalty to being used as a throwing weapon. it deals only 6d6 damage. Bruse Willis got a vorpal on it.

[obryn]

In Live Free and Die Hard, John McClain does almost nothing but "near-mystical feats of arms". Assuming you look far enough past the explosions and corny dialogue to see the ridiculousness contained within it.
.....
Fighters pulling off this stuff ARE performing "near-mystical feats of arms". And fighters are capable of so much more as well.

Yes. And what I'm saying is that the mechanics of 3.5/PF don't support this at all.

-O

[Slipperychicken]

Then WHY ARE YOU PLAYING ONE OF THE CRUNCHIEST GAMES KNOWN TO MAN?

You know, this sentence summarizes my feelings toward the entire crowd of self-described "roleplayers" in 3.5 who build completely ineffective characters, do something moronic like fly into a dragon's face and taunt it (getting their asses handed to them, naturally), then spend half the game whining about how "restrictive" the rules are (and how "banal" it is to be reminded that whatever lunacy they're trying literally can't work by RAW, RAI, common sense, or science. Or even needing to remember they have to wait their turn, and have to roll to grapple.), while refusing to take any plot hook or integrate into the party because "it's fun" to watch everyone fumble over the smoking wreck which the game has become.

[rockdeworld]

I haven't seen it either, to be honest if someone could post some of the most outstanding badass scenes in the movie for analysis, that'd be appreciated.

McCain shoots himself point-blank in the heart/lungs to hit the guy behind him.
McCain fights off a martial artist after getting beaten up.
McCain jumps out of a car going 50+ MPH onto asphalt (which is more dangerous than movies make it appear), and stands up.

Most of the Die Hard movies involve McCain getting beaten up and then winning.

a Car has a -16 non-proficiency penalty to being used as a throwing weapon. it deals only 6d6 damage. Bruse Willis got a vorpal on it.

Helicopters are made of tinfoil and prayers (only a slight exaggeration). You can actually punch through their sides. It doesn't take much to take one out.

[toapat]

Helicopters are made of tinfoil and prayers (only a slight exaggeration). You can actually punch through their sides. It doesn't take much to take one out.

yes, helicopters have no real protection beyond that required for pressurization.

it doesnt change the fact that the construct rules give it something along the lines of 95hp.

[rockdeworld]

In D20 modern? I don't think 3.5 can handle that.

[jaybird]

"You just took out a Helicopter with a car!?!"
"I was out of bullets"

Well, Warblades CAN re-train all their weapon-related feats...

EDIT:

And yes, this:

You know, this sentence summarizes my feelings toward the entire crowd of self-described "roleplayers" in 3.5 who build completely ineffective characters, do something moronic like fly into a dragon's face and taunt it (getting their asses handed to them, naturally), then spend half the game whining about how "restrictive" the rules are (and how "banal" it is to be reminded that whatever lunacy they're trying literally can't work by RAW, RAI, common sense, or science. Or even needing to remember they have to wait their turn, and have to roll to grapple.), while refusing to take any plot hook or integrate into the party because "it's fun" to watch everyone fumble over the smoking wreck which the game has become.

Gb2WoD.

[kardar233]

Helicopters are made of tinfoil and prayers (only a slight exaggeration). You can actually punch through their sides. It doesn't take much to take one out.

This is why the only helicopters I will fly in modern games are Hinds.

[Thinker]

Here's my opinion on what a fighter should be.

At level one they should be raw recruits, by level three should be masters of their chosen weaponry, and by level six should be the pinnacle of human achievement with all weaponry. After that, they should be in the realm of the superhuman. By level 20 they should be the strongest, fastest, and best in the world at fighting, immune to undesirable magical effects, and able to pump out plenty of supernatural effects of their own. Chopping a mountain in half or punching out a dragon should be trivial to a high-level fighter. They should also be invulnerable to ambushes, stealth, or anything else like that.

A fighter should control the whole battlefield, ignoring any sort of rough terrain and creating his own at will. If an opponent is out of reach, the fighter should be able to reach it. If an opponent tries to escape, the fighter should always be able to follow. If an opponent tries to dodge incoming damage, the fighter should be able to hit anyway. If an opponent tries to deal damage to the fighter, the fighter should be able to soak it. If an opponent tries to target someone other than the fighter, the fighter should be able to stop it. By higher levels, a fighter should transcend to controlling entire war campaigns, rather than merely a small battle.

[toapat]

Well, Warblades CAN re-train all their weapon-related feats...

Even with Improvised Weapon Proficiency, you still take the penalties to throwing a car

[Hiro Protagonest]

Well, Warblades CAN re-train all their weapon-related feats...

A) It takes an hour to do so.
B) It's only things like Weapon Focus. Maybe Melee Weapon Mastery. Not enough to turn the tide against all those penalties.

[nedz]

"You just took out a Helicopter with a car!?!"
"I was out of bullets"

a Car has a -16 non-proficiency penalty to being used as a throwing weapon. it deals only 6d6 damage. Bruse Willis got a vorpal on it.

Wizards should be helicopters then.

[Libertad]

This is my ideal Fighter. Hopefully they replicate this in 5th Edition.