Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[Tinkerer]

Phew, it was getting a little chilly in here until a horde of cat-girls ran in and jumped into my furnace. I asked them why they were doing that and they pointed me to this thread.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Phew, it was getting a little chilly in here until a horde of cat-girls ran in an jumped into my furnace. I asked them why they were doing that and they pointed me to this thread.

Poor cat girls...I'll take some of them off your hands/claws/whatever if you don't want them

[Talakeal]

This thread seems to have gone from discussing the "Guy at the Gym," fallacy into perhaps the most aggressive application of the "But Dragons!" fallacy that I have ever seen.


Hard truth; fiction is fiction. It never happened, and it couldn't have happened. Any story except for a perfectly accurate retelling of true events (which is all but impossible) is going to be a fiction. Even the most grounded of dramas is going to rely on the unbelievably fantastic base assumption that there is another world out there that is exactly like our world but including people and events that never existed.

Fiction is not a binary; people are fully able to except a world where some impossible things happen but the world otherwise functions like reality. Literally every genre in every medium includes some things that do not function like our reality and some things that do.

There is nothing wrong with having a world where humans function like real humans, horses function like real horses, dogs function like real dogs, giants function like fictional giants, zombies function like fictional zombies, and dragons function like fictional dragons. It is all imagination either way.

On the other hand there is nothing wrong with a setting where the opposite is true, but IMO the general default assumption is that things work like they do in real life unless otherwise noted; I believe one of the Sage Advice articles about 3.X specifically calls out this general design principal as a standard for DMs who need to make rulings.


You can have a setting where every martial character draws upon Chi or other ambient magical energies to boost their life forces, but IMO that is not the default assumption for any class except for the monk. Otherwise the fighter is just really that good with a sword and the barbarian is really just that angry.


Now, you might point out some unrealistic things about mundane characters, HP allowing a high level character to reliably survive ridiculously deadly things, rogues evading things they can't possibly escape, barbarians having limited numbers of rages, and my personal pet peeve martial classes with fire and forget maneuvers. And sure, you CAN describe these things as supernatural or "extra normal" abilities; but IMO they are best thought of as abstractions made for the sake of gameplay / narrative, in the same way that the game rules don't require people to eat different amounts of rations every day based on their specific size and activity level and never force someone to need a bathroom break in the middle of the dungeon.

[Quertus]

Not quite.

I am saying that printed D&D already doesn't include anything that a mundane character wouldn't be able to beat outside of people who abuse a handful of broken "I-win button" spells and that every other edition of D&D manages to allow both martial and magical characters to shine.

3.X nerfed the martials and has a few spells that are essentially win buttons.

Buff martials back to AD&D levels and they can handle any 3.X encounter that does not rely heavily on enemies abusing said win button spells.

If you also nerfed those win-button spells you now have an environment where any archetype can play the game and contribute without trivializing CR appropriate encounters.

AFAICT Cosi likes the 3.5 level of balance because he wants to play high powered characters who get to look down on all the muggles and don't have to worry about limitations.

I prefer an AD&D level of balance because it allows everyone to contribute while still being able to play the archetype they want to play.

I'm not sure the Wizard of olde really was able to contribute anywhere near equally, though, outside of PO if not TO, at least not until unrealistically high levels, after literal years of game play.

And I'm not sure that 3e is really a nerf to martial characters. There's nothing at its power level (and few things above!) that the übercharger can't one-shot, good rogue builds deal consistent SA damage (as opposed to the Thief, who maybe got in one good shot), buffs are plentiful, huge swaths of weapon proficiencies are free, and cool tricks like whirlwind attack and spring attack exist.

But at least, in 3e, casters got nice things, too.

That they got too many, plus some broken things, is an issue, but I'm not sure that actually makes them disproportionately better than their peers than old-school fighters were.

All that having been said, beyond pure broken infinite combos, what do you consider their handful of win buttons that need to be nerfed?

Let's do some napkin math. An adult dragon weighs on order multiple tons (say 2000 kg to make the math easy). An adult human weighs on order 100 kg. If the dragon shapeshifts into a human, you have (order of) 1900 kg of mass to get rid of somehow. Conservation requires that that mass go somewhere. If it's converted to (magical) energy with 100% efficiency, you're looking at approximately 1.7 x 10^20 J of energy. That's an extinction-level event (gigatons of TNT, on the similar order to a medium asteroid strike). And yes, we detect things of that order using gravity all the time--it's one way we look for oil, by noticing the deviations in the path of satellites due to the reduced density of the oil-bearing rock.

And I love the idea that extinction level power is insignificant compared to the power raging through the co-existent parallel plane of magic, where all this energy comes from and goes to. 100 dragons can simultaneously polymorph, teleport to a new location, and polymorph back with no fear that there isn't enough power there to support the change. This is low-level magic, and is nothing next to high-end magic. Or epic magic. Or divine magic (ie, of the gods, not their followers). Or the power of the overpowers. This pathetic little "end the world" power is just a drop in the bucket. You can spam such shape changes all day long, and not even notice any effect on the tapestry of magic.

I see no reason to believe that the rules of our reality are incompatible with forces which, by default, do not interact with them, or which we have not detected yet. Like Dark Matter.

Otoh, cast a few Evil spells, and the D&D world notices: the area might become chilly, or shadows deepen. Evil bleeds into the world in ways magic on its own doesn't. This gives me far more trouble than any amount of "but physics" ever has.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And I love the idea that extinction level power is insignificant compared to the power raging through the co-existent parallel plane of magic, where all this energy comes from and goes to. 100 dragons can simultaneously polymorph, teleport to a new location, and polymorph back with no fear that there isn't enough power there to support the change. This is low-level magic, and is nothing next to high-end magic. Or epic magic. Or divine magic (ie, of the gods, not their followers). Or the power of the overpowers. This pathetic little "end the world" power is just a drop in the bucket. You can spam such shape changes all day long, and not even notice any effect on the tapestry of magic.

I see no reason to believe that the rules of our reality are incompatible with forces which, by default, do not interact with them, or which we have not detected yet. Like Dark Matter.

Otoh, cast a few Evil spells, and the D&D world notices: the area might become chilly, or shadows deepen. Evil bleeds into the world in ways magic on its own doesn't. This gives me far more trouble than any amount of "but physics" ever has.

One note--if there's even the possibility of interaction, they're part of the universe and their energy density (mass-equivalent) applies. That makes for black hole territory if we're following regular laws. Which we don't have to at all. But you can't have it both ways. Either the similarity is surface and the "real" laws are quite different or the "real" laws are the same and there's no magic. Bolt-on magic is unfair to both magic and science. It's lazy world-building at best. It's also impossible to balance, since one side has carte blanche to break the rules that everyone else has to follow.

Let's be fair--if a wizard can break "real life physics" into a million sparkling shards at first level (which any spell can do), so a fighter should be able to. Just in different ways (and probably not as flashily). Survive where others can't, shrug off effects or hits that would obliterate a lesser person, make that 1 in a million shot, hit hard enough that a normal person would be thrown backward (Newton's 3rd law is somewhat inflexible there), things like that.

And no, this isn't "but dragons" (which isn't a real fallacy, anyway...nor is this formal logic where fallacies matter) because I'm not trying to excuse any arbitrary feat--just following up on the natural consequences of changes. Those who claim that only wizards* should be able to freely break natural law by claiming "magic can do that!" are treading closer to that logic flaw--either magic is part of nature (in which the natural laws we know need substantial alterations which can include non-spellcasters doing "impossible" things) or it's not (in which case wizards don't exist either). Spells and spell-casting aren't the sum total of magic. They're one particular sub-category that has somehow convinced people that magic <==> spells. Which is not universally true, not now, not never. There may be settings that have that as a principle, but D&D has never claimed that, nor would it make sense in the established settings.

*wizard is a short reference for the entire set of spell-casting archetypes here.

Edit: and Quertus, combat power (direct HP damage) has never been the problem. Fighters (if built along one particular restrictive line) can do lots of that. But they can't do anything else. Wizards (or clerics, druids, etc) can do that and everything else as well. Even if a fighter could do +INFINITY damage with a single strike, that means little if the setup is obnoxious or especially if most enemies only have ~200 HP at most. Especially since an ubercharger can't do anything else--no skills, no backups, no out-of-combat utility--nothing. He's a guided weapon, not a character. At the same time, wizards* can do enough (especially with SoD spells) damage to handle anything and still have tons of skills and oodles of flexible utility elsewhere. Plus, the muggle is dependent on the wizard* to make all those magic items without which he's absolutely useless.

[GreatWyrmGold]

{{scrubbed}}

Depends. If the new rules (of "physics") are sufficiently simple, it may indeed be easier to use them than the old rules. Most RPG sets fit this criteria. A problem then arises that the new rules are not sufficiently complex to create all the situations and all the phenomena required for the game to be interesting, usefull and immersive. The handiest way to get around this is to have a real, human person capable of using real knowledge serving as an oracle for the game, overwriting the rules and filling in the missing phenomena and situations where the new, simpler rules are inefficient for creatig them.

You may have heard of such a person. They're usually called a "game master". There might even be a game you know of which includes one.

...Did you actually read my f*ing post? Whenever the most logical response to a counter-argument is to repost what the argument was allegedly countering, there's a problem. You basically rephrased the very thing I was responding to.

For a fantasy setting, you couldn't have a (unspecified, even) set of "laws" that produce a reality that functions and appears very similar to ours in most instances, but also allows for extraordinary effects that aren't possible in our reality?

...
Well, at least it's not only the people responding to me repeating essentially the same arguments that I've already argued against. At length.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Thinking about it, I'm sorry for derailing the thread off onto a tangent. Mea culpa. I'll stop now.

[Zale]

{{scrubbed}}

Dude, that's incredibly rude and really hostile. I think you can disagree with people without insulting them.

This is why I don't usually like to participate in these discussions.

Under other circumstances, I'd explain why some of the things you are suggesting are "answers" to a magic-realism thing, but that's off topic and your sheer hostility means it's not worthwhile.

[Max_Killjoy]

...
Well, at least it's not only the people responding to me repeating essentially the same arguments that I've already argued against. At length.

If you argued against what I posted there, I missed it, and some of what you've said -- even above in the same post you made this comment in -- seems to me to have been pointing in the same direction as my comment.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Dude, that's incredibly rude and really hostile. I think you can disagree with people without insulting them.

This is why I don't usually like to participate in these discussions.

Under other circumstances, I'd explain why some of the things you are suggesting are "answers" to a magic-realism thing, but that's off topic and your sheer hostility means it's not worthwhile.

Glad to know it's not just me that feels significant hostility and unwillingness to accept other ideas.

[Cluedrew]

No, this thread has defiantly been getting... emotional, where the emotions are mostly negative.

Personally, the caster/martial thing is something that keeps coming up and to this day, there are many parts of people's opinions that I do not understand. I would love to get back to talking about those.

[PhoenixPhyre]

No, this thread has defiantly been getting... emotional, where the emotions are mostly negative.

Personally, the caster/martial thing is something that keeps coming up and to this day, there are many parts of people's opinions that I do not understand. I would love to get back to talking about those.

I agree, and apologize for my comments that were decidedly not helping. I think I'll stay out for a while and see if it can get back on track.

[Quertus]

One note--if there's even the possibility of interaction, they're part of the universe and their energy density (mass-equivalent) applies. That makes for black hole territory if we're following regular laws. Which we don't have to at all. But you can't have it both ways. Either the similarity is surface and the "real" laws are quite different or the "real" laws are the same and there's no magic. Bolt-on magic is unfair to both magic and science. It's lazy world-building at best. It's also impossible to balance, since one side has carte blanche to break the rules that everyone else has to follow.

Let's be fair--if a wizard can break "real life physics" into a million sparkling shards at first level (which any spell can do), so a fighter should be able to. Just in different ways (and probably not as flashily). Survive where others can't, shrug off effects or hits that would obliterate a lesser person, make that 1 in a million shot, hit hard enough that a normal person would be thrown backward (Newton's 3rd law is somewhat inflexible there), things like that.

And no, this isn't "but dragons" (which isn't a real fallacy, anyway...nor is this formal logic where fallacies matter) because I'm not trying to excuse any arbitrary feat--just following up on the natural consequences of changes. Those who claim that only wizards* should be able to freely break natural law by claiming "magic can do that!" are treading closer to that logic flaw--either magic is part of nature (in which the natural laws we know need substantial alterations which can include non-spellcasters doing "impossible" things) or it's not (in which case wizards don't exist either). Spells and spell-casting aren't the sum total of magic. They're one particular sub-category that has somehow convinced people that magic <==> spells. Which is not universally true, not now, not never. There may be settings that have that as a principle, but D&D has never claimed that, nor would it make sense in the established settings.

*wizard is a short reference for the entire set of spell-casting archetypes here.

Edit: and Quertus, combat power (direct HP damage) has never been the problem. Fighters (if built along one particular restrictive line) can do lots of that. But they can't do anything else. Wizards (or clerics, druids, etc) can do that and everything else as well. Even if a fighter could do +INFINITY damage with a single strike, that means little if the setup is obnoxious or especially if most enemies only have ~200 HP at most. Especially since an ubercharger can't do anything else--no skills, no backups, no out-of-combat utility--nothing. He's a guided weapon, not a character. At the same time, wizards* can do enough (especially with SoD spells) damage to handle anything and still have tons of skills and oodles of flexible utility elsewhere. Plus, the muggle is dependent on the wizard* to make all those magic items without which he's absolutely useless.

If we're following regular laws? Does dark matter follow regular laws? Do black holes follow regular laws? Does light follow regular laws? There seem to be an awful lot of things that follow their own laws - why is it unthinkable for there to be yet another that science hasn't discovered yet?

What if gravity is limited to three dimensions, and magical energy by default does not interact because it is in a different dimension / different universe / different plane of existence? Not unlike where Dark Matter supposedly comes from? (my science is not only old but pop culture here)

I'm all about magic being natural (**** you, Druids!). And it following its own, distinct natural laws. But largely ignoring all the others, which simply don't apply to it.

-----

In older editions, the Fighter did everything, and did it better. Oh, the Wizard has an attack spell once per day? The Fighter can just attack at will, and be better. Oh, the Wizard can see invisibility once per day? The Fighter has been carrying a bag of flour for a couple levels now. Oh, the Wizard can throw AoE damage? The Fighter has had multi-target ranged attacks forever, and has or will soon get multiple melee attacks. Oh, the Wizard can fly? The Fighter has had range, and the Thief has had at will climb, since more or less the beginning of the game. Oh, the Wizard has SoD spells? Well, the Fighter has been able to waste his turn (say, picking his nose) since 1st level, so that's no big deal either.

[Satinavian]

Let's do some napkin math. An adult dragon weighs on order multiple tons (say 2000 kg to make the math easy). An adult human weighs on order 100 kg. If the dragon shapeshifts into a human, you have (order of) 1900 kg of mass to get rid of somehow. Conservation requires that that mass go somewhere. If it's converted to (magical) energy with 100% efficiency, you're looking at approximately 1.7 x 10^20 J of energy. That's an extinction-level event (gigatons of TNT, on the similar order to a medium asteroid strike). And yes, we detect things of that order using gravity all the time--it's one way we look for oil, by noticing the deviations in the path of satellites due to the reduced density of the oil-bearing rock.

Yes, it is a lot of energy. But it is not energy you release in form of heat. It is energy you deposit into the magic field via the transformation spell. And no, measuring the gravitational forces of just 1900kg o something on the earh surface (around a lot of other massive objects ) is nothing that we can do that easily.
I mean only in this decase we finally charted Earths gravity distribution at all and niot even remotely with that kind of precision.

But bolting on energy transformations of that magnitude (or even that of a fireball) would have detectable entropy effects (changes in temperature, etc.) Those would be obviously noticeable by even crude instruments.

Why ? Condidering that those spells usually have limited duration and the being ends up as a dragon again suggests it is a reversible or nearly reversible effect. Considering that spell durations are even a thing, transformation magic should be modelled as some kind of transition to a excited state of the combined system of spell target and magic field that is not particularly stable and produces entropy to be sustained while there should be limited entropy produced by the spell event itself. And in any case, most of the entropy would probably end up in this huge energy reservoir called magic field anyway.

If all you do is bolt on magic, the direct consequences would be directly visible even to crude instruments. Now whether that matters--depends on the group as you say.For most people that's fine, as long you don't think too hard.

Well, obviously yes. If magic exists it can be measured. It becomes part of science. The physics we know becomes the bordercase for no interaction with the magic field which is usefull for every case where the interaction is negligible.

That's what I'm desiring--either accept that you can't think too hard about things or they'll fall apart or accept that everything is really different and only conveniently happens to act (on the surface) as our world does and that your "clever" tricks (Polymorph Any Object a rock into uranium! Instant nukes!) may not work as written and no amount of "but in the real world..." will save you from having rulebooks thrown at you.

We are talking about a worldbuilding excersice where the magic system is supposed to make sense, be selfconsistent and follow basically physical laws. The last thing one would ever do to achieve that is taking D&D kitchen sink magic lacking all of that.

And yes, you probably don't want your magic allowing for instant nukes. But that doesn't mean that your regular nukes won't work just that you have to make sure your magic does not allow for it.



Sure, you could give up all of regular physics and still make the world look mostly the same. I once ran in a game where medieval alchemical theories were true (which conveniently also explain most of our worls as they were made to do so). But i find it easier if physical laws apply. Otherweise you get endless stupid questions about what works and what doesn't.

I once was in a game where explicitely atoms did not exist and chemical reactions might produce different results (only because game writers didn't want gunpowder or other bright player inventions) and we discussed for hours about how crystals could work, if this world had any differences at all between gemstones and glass and how this would or would not effect other kinds of things like certain optical properties.

[Frozen_Feet]

.
When you're dealing with the consequences of changes to physical laws, it's all magic whether we call it speculative or novum, or magic. That's entirely semantic. Hard sci-fi and FTL travel don't go together. "Speculative FTL" is an oxymoron.

Of course this is semantics, the everyday semantics of magic do not reduce to "what's impossible in reality", so you have to justify why redifining semantics of the old word is preferable to using another word, especially given there are other words that already have meaning you desire to invoke.

Your notions of hard sci-fi are flat-out wrong. Hard sci-fi is based on speculation based on contemporary theories - when and where theories contemporary to the work suggested FTL was possible in some form, the work is not excluded, even if the theory is later shown to be wrong and FTL impossible. Hence, "speculative FTL" is not oxymoronic, either under the normal definition or the one under discussion, as you could handily learn by looking up "speculative" in a god damn dictionary.

But in this context, I was specifically discussing fantasy worlds--hence the focus on things like wizards and dragons. In this context, calling anything impossible in real life "magic" makes complete sense and fixes a lot of problems. In a different context, I'd use a different definition. I'm fine with polysemy.

It also gives the false impression that all things "magic" are somehow equivalent, which leads to the impression that any magic user can do any impossible thing.

I've said in the past that magic is a buzzword that can mean whatever the Hell an author wants it to mean. Redefinitions like yours are primary contributors to that. They make the already loaded word "magic" uselessly broad.

Also, using the words "fantasy" and "fantastic" to refer to impossible things is a) already widespread and b) clearer than using "magic" and "magical" for the purpose you want.

And I'd claim that my definition is useful because it obliterates the cause of the problem at hand--the restriction of "mundane" (muggle) characters to only those things possible in real life while allowing "magic" characters to do virtually anything because magic breaks the rules. Once we accept that they're all magic, just in different ways and using different tools, the conceptual barrier to letting fighters* have nice things goes away as does much of the barrier to focusing the caster-types down. It allows us to build useful models of how magic works in a particular setting that make predictions about the kind of powers certain characters would reasonably have in that setting.

*fighter here is metonymy for all muggle-type non-spell-casting archetypes.

The much worse problem again is the false impression that any magic user can do any impossible thing, which through equivocation and semantic confusion leads to the concept that a Wizard, classic image of a magic-user, ought to be a able of any thing impossible.

And to obliterate that problem, to make clear what magic can't do, it is much better to be more specific in which concepts you're using by using more specific terms and distinctions, such as what I've already shown: mundane versus extraordinary, human versus superhuman, magic versus non-magic, natural versus supernatural, and now, speculative versus realistic.

The same goes for fighter, like I already said. A fighter has an accepted common meaning, it is someone who fights. Magic has accepted common meaning, it is using chants, spells and rituals to invoke the supernatural or influence nature. Whether someone is a fighter ought to have no bearing on whether they use magic, and vice versa, based on common meanong of the words. The entire "problem" you claimed to obliterate was caused by RPG folks doing what you're doing now, the conflation of "fighter" and "mundane".

[Cluedrew]

And everyone replies to PhoenixPhyre's posts before he decided he needed to calm down anyways.

Of course this is semantics, the everyday semantics of magic do not reduce to "what's impossible in reality", so you have to justify why redifining semantics of the old word is preferable to using another word, especially given there are other words that already have meaning you desire to invoke.

To be fair, everyone I know who is not involved in the RPG community, minus a couple of academics, uses the word. I don't know how widespread that is, but around where I am it seems pretty standard (along with a couple other uses of the word that do not apply here) and perhaps that is how it is used around PhoenixPhyre. Regardless, I do agree with the need to split things up in a more precisely for this context. Fantasy/fantastic is one way to do it. I use the word impossible mostly (magic things are impossible*, but not all impossible things are magic) because, well that seemed to be the divide we are talking about.

Either way, a level 20 fighter (or equivalent) should be able to be impossible or fantastic without being magical. The thing that really has me stumped is why people refuse that possibility. Anyone know?

*usually.

[Frozen_Feet]

Either way, a level 20 fighter (or equivalent) should be able to be impossible or fantastic without being magical. The thing that really has me stumped is why people refuse that possibility. Anyone know?

There are multiple reasons, depending on which subset of these people you're talking of.

Let's take care of the simplest subset first: 1) people who want to play realistic humans and aren't interested in a game where their characters leave that category. They may still want to play fantasy, meaning they may want the game to include fantastic elements that aren't playable characters, such as dragons, vile sorcerers, flying castles etc.

To cater to these people, you need a system calibrated so that the full range of playable levels for their desired character archetype stays within realistic limits, and possibly that the full range of playable scenarios remains solvable by realistic humans. (All editions of D&D fail these criteria.)

An alternative is to craft the system so that part of the range of playable levels for their desired character archetype stays within realistic limits, and part of the range of playable scenarios is solvable by realistic humans. (Some editions of D&D pass, but just barely.) Then you make this explicit and clear to these kinds of players, and give them instructions on how to build the game they want to play within the system. (D&D is bad at this, but some expansions, variants and retroclones of it aren't.)

You may not want to play the same game as these people, but at least their problem is solvable because they themselves don't possess conflicting desires.

Which brings us to the next subset: 2) people with ill-realized or conflicting desires. They want a character that is realistically human. They also want a character that can keep up with impossible badasses. These people cannot be pleased untill you get them to drop one of their desires or find a working synthesis of them.

Then there are 3) people whose verisimilitude is broken when dude who is not wearing a funny hat, waving a wand and growing a beard (etc.) does something fantastic. These people may also want there to be muggle characters around who they can lord their awesome powers over. Again, easy group to please, as they themselves have no conflicting desires. Just give them a game where doing magic, that is, using rituals, chants, charms (etc.) is necessary for phenomenal cosmic power. (Some versions of D&D are good at this, but most are actually quite bad, as they assume all player characters, Fighters included, are expected to gain some fantastic possesions and have some amount of supernatural favor.)

Then there are 4) people who want to play a game based on specific work of fiction, where fantastic fighters aren't a thing, but some other type of fantastic characters are. These people get sad if fighters break the rules of their favored fictionland. To please them, you must either calibrate the full range of playable levels and encounters to stay within limits of the fictional world, or ensure a subset of playable levels and scenarios are within those levels, and then again make this explicit to the players and give them instructions hoe to do it. (D&D is decent at this and has many expansions, variants and retroclones dedicated to doing exactly this.)

These threads feel to me like they're primarily fueled by playgroups which have a mix of these sorts of players, and the GMs are hanging themselves on the rope of "Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun!"

Conflating arguments by different types of players also creates a false impression that more players fall in category 2) than really do.

[Quertus]

No, this thread has defiantly been getting... emotional, where the emotions are mostly negative.

Personally, the caster/martial thing is something that keeps coming up and to this day, there are many parts of people's opinions that I do not understand. I would love to get back to talking about those.

I agree, and apologize for my comments that were decidedly not helping. I think I'll stay out for a while and see if it can get back on track.

I'm not certain that issues with the magical underpinnings of the world don't actually contribute to the problem, and that, thus, this wouldn't be a valid line if inquiry for the thread topic. Getting people to change - or at least examine and express - the fundamental underpinnings of their beliefs is often essential to successful communication and negotiation.

However, we can certainly try a different approach. In fact:

There are multiple reasons, depending on which subset of these people you're talking of.

This might have some promise. I'll poke at it throughout the day.

[Max_Killjoy]

Either way, a level 20 fighter (or equivalent) should be able to be impossible or fantastic without being magical. The thing that really has me stumped is why people refuse that possibility. Anyone know?

At least for me, I'm not refusing the possibility.

What I'm refusing is the idea that you can have a setting in which all three of the following are true:

• Fighters can do things that are fantastic or impossible from the POV of our reality.
• Those things are also fantastic from the POV of the fictional reality; that is, they're something special and reserved for a handful of "special" persons.
• Fighters are not "magical" in that setting. (Note that "magic" DOES NOT MEAN "spellcasting".)

So if the "fighters" in your setting can leap 50' straight up and crush stone walls with their bare hands, either those capabilities are not magical in the setting and their capabilities simply represent the peak of abilities that are normal in that reality and impossible in ours (maybe your average peasant can leap 25' straight up and crack large stones with their best punch, whatever), or those capabilities are somehow magical. There's no other choice.

And I'm sure someone will say "but he trained really hard". OK, fine. But no one in our reality can train hard enough to leap 50' straight up and crush stone walls with their bare hands. So again, either that other reality is different and these are abilities within the realm of the perfectly possible there, or their training took them into the ream of the "magical" for that setting. Again, no other choice.


Now, this does tie into the topic of the thread, but I think I'd be repeating an earlier post in detail if I laid it all out again.

Which brings us to the next subset: 2) people with ill-realized or conflicting desires. They want a character that is realistically human. They also want a character that can keep up with impossible badasses. These people cannot be pleased untill you get them to drop one of their desires or find a working synthesis of them.

Indeed. That's the impossible thing, the "have their cake and eat it too" problem.

[Darth Ultron]

Either way, a level 20 fighter (or equivalent) should be able to be impossible or fantastic without being magical. The thing that really has me stumped is why people refuse that possibility. Anyone know?

I for one don't understand why magic has to be so ''special'' and ''different''.

If a Fighter ''must not use magic'', then what ''must'' a Wizard ''not'' use?

Should a Wizard never use anything not created by magic? Like should they have no items made by mundane ways? Maybe even no magic items...as you do have to make the item by mundane ways first. Even a spell book is made by mundane ways.

A Spellcaster can use mundane strength and fighting skill and add in magic to make devastating natural attacks. An Arcane Archer is shooting an arrow from a bow...with an added magical effect.

So why does the Spellcaster get to use Everything, but Fighters must use no magic?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Is Batman "realistically human?" Is Aragorn? Is Chris Redfield? Is Caramon Majerie? Is Guts? Is Ajax? Is Ciaphus Cain? Is Samurai Jack? Is Solid Snake? Do we even have an idea of what that term means?

[Lord Raziere]

Indeed. That's the impossible thing, the "have their cake and eat it too" problem.

Yeah, for something like making your own character awesome? realism is overrated. sure a dash of it is good here and there, but it should not be the main ingredient. save realism for the NPC's and how the troubles of the world affect people who aren't awesome. the PC's are often people of power, maybe not the normal kinds of power (political/economical) but they are powerful enough all the same, enough to defeat monsters the common people fear- and if they can do that to the monsters, imagine how much of a chance that common person has against them.

[Twizzly513]

I'm reading a book series called Guardians of the Flame, which I think could be the kind of thing you are looking for. In the book, wizards and spellcasters are dangerous, mysterious, and powerful, but magic in the book is a) very rare b) hard to control at best, explosively counterproductive at worst c) hard to master.

A) is solely dependent on what a DM wants, so that's not necessarily going to show in a system. That's more world-building.

B) is something that could be easily implemented into a system. Fizzling and concentration are good examples of this. You could also roll just to cast any spell, and depending on the roll, something happens. You could look at the mutation system from Paranoia XP for this, or you could just do: No, and | No | No, but | Yes, but | Yes | Yes, and system of how far away they are from the roll-to-beat. This is something that I feel should be emphasized much more across the board in RPGs. Paranoia had it damn close to perfect.

C) Just do what used to happen: Wizards and other primary casters level slower than martial classes. At lower levels, it won't be as big of a deal, as it shouldn't be since the gap hasn't gotten big yet. At higher levels, this will close the gap of power. Wizards can still attain more power, it just takes longer, as magic should.

Hope my two cp helped.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, for something like making your own character awesome? realism is overrated. sure a dash of it is good here and there, but it should not be the main ingredient. save realism for the NPC's and how the troubles of the world affect people who aren't awesome. the PC's are often people of power, maybe not the normal kinds of power (political/economical) but they are powerful enough all the same, enough to defeat monsters the common people fear- and if they can do that to the monsters, imagine how much of a chance that common person has against them.

First, who said anything about realism?

Second, capabilities can be uncommon, special, or awesome (old sense or new)... without being impossible, magical, or "unrealistic".

[Quertus]

Is Batman "realistically human?"

Batman is my least favorite character precisely because he's supposed to be "human", but misses the mark. Badly.

There are multiple reasons, depending on which subset of these people you're talking of.

Let's take care of the simplest subset first: 1) people who want to play realistic humans and aren't interested in a game where their characters leave that category. They may still want to play fantasy, meaning they may want the game to include fantastic elements that aren't playable characters, such as dragons, vile sorcerers, flying castles etc.

To cater to these people, you need a system calibrated so that the full range of playable levels for their desired character archetype stays within realistic limits, and possibly that the full range of playable scenarios remains solvable by realistic humans. (All editions of D&D fail these criteria.)

An alternative is to craft the system so that part of the range of playable levels for their desired character archetype stays within realistic limits, and part of the range of playable scenarios is solvable by realistic humans. (Some editions of D&D pass, but just barely.) Then you make this explicit and clear to these kinds of players, and give them instructions on how to build the game they want to play within the system. (D&D is bad at this, but some expansions, variants and retroclones of it aren't.)

You may not want to play the same game as these people, but at least their problem is solvable because they themselves don't possess conflicting desires.

Which brings us to the next subset: 2) people with ill-realized or conflicting desires. They want a character that is realistically human. They also want a character that can keep up with impossible badasses. These people cannot be pleased untill you get them to drop one of their desires or find a working synthesis of them.

Then there are 3) people whose verisimilitude is broken when dude who is not wearing a funny hat, waving a wand and growing a beard (etc.) does something fantastic. These people may also want there to be muggle characters around who they can lord their awesome powers over. Again, easy group to please, as they themselves have no conflicting desires. Just give them a game where doing magic, that is, using rituals, chants, charms (etc.) is necessary for phenomenal cosmic power. (Some versions of D&D are good at this, but most are actually quite bad, as they assume all player characters, Fighters included, are expected to gain some fantastic possesions and have some amount of supernatural favor.)

Then there are 4) people who want to play a game based on specific work of fiction, where fantastic fighters aren't a thing, but some other type of fantastic characters are. These people get sad if fighters break the rules of their favored fictionland. To please them, you must either calibrate the full range of playable levels and encounters to stay within limits of the fictional world, or ensure a subset of playable levels and scenarios are within those levels, and then again make this explicit to the players and give them instructions hoe to do it. (D&D is decent at this and has many expansions, variants and retroclones dedicated to doing exactly this.)

These threads feel to me like they're primarily fueled by playgroups which have a mix of these sorts of players, and the GMs are hanging themselves on the rope of "Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun! Every player must have fun!"

Conflating arguments by different types of players also creates a false impression that more players fall in category 2) than really do.

#1 is only true if they care about balance / meddle with what other people are playing. If they're fine playing a human while someone else is playing Spider-Man, then there's not an issue.

#2 can work if the player in question possesses significantly greater player skills / metagame resources, or the other PCs hold the idiot ball. But that's certainly not something you can just expect to be true.

-----

So, to use the thread title, mundane can't beat caster because 1) mundane won't let it; 2) mundane expects to do so anyway; 3) caster won't let it; 4) the world won't let it. Is that a fair summary?

If so, it's no wonder the attitude "play a Wizard or expect to play second fiddle" exists - that's a rather intimidating list of reasons!

[oxybe]

I'm reading a book series called Guardians of the Flame, which I think could be the kind of thing you are looking for. In the book, wizards and spellcasters are dangerous, mysterious, and powerful, but magic in the book is a) very rare b) hard to control at best, explosively counterproductive at worst c) hard to master.

A) is solely dependent on what a DM wants, so that's not necessarily going to show in a system. That's more world-building.

B) is something that could be easily implemented into a system. Fizzling and concentration are good examples of this. You could also roll just to cast any spell, and depending on the roll, something happens. You could look at the mutation system from Paranoia XP for this, or you could just do: No, and | No | No, but | Yes, but | Yes | Yes, and system of how far away they are from the roll-to-beat. This is something that I feel should be emphasized much more across the board in RPGs. Paranoia had it damn close to perfect.

C) Just do what used to happen: Wizards and other primary casters level slower than martial classes. At lower levels, it won't be as big of a deal, as it shouldn't be since the gap hasn't gotten big yet. At higher levels, this will close the gap of power. Wizards can still attain more power, it just takes longer, as magic should.

Hope my two cp helped.

What works in books & movies doesn't necessarily translate well to gameplay. In a book or movie, you largely have one author or a group of authors deciding how a story and the characters are going to play out. In a TTRPG, you have 5-7 authors each controlling different characters and while they may have their own idea on how they would like a given situation to play out, until it's actually resolved no one can say for certain what will happen in advance (barring stuff like railroading).

A) I'm fine with this. PCs are rare things in themselves. The world has tens and hundreds of thousands of NPCs, but on 4-6 PCs.

B) Making the main focus of a class, spellcasting in this case, unreliable or a hassle to use dissuades you from playing casters. For me at least, no matter how much fun a character's personality is, if they're a bother to actually play or I feel dissuaded to actually use the features of their class... It doesn't make the experience fun and I'm not engaging with the game... I'm largely trying my best not to be engaged so I don't suffer the drawbacks.

If a game's magic system is only the unreliable type, I largely dislike it barring no one being a caster first and foremost. A "caster" is someone who just happens to have spells as part of their skillset rather then it's focus. As such i'm not feeling dissuaded from using my abilities since it's not just all a gamble and I don't feel like my actions are wasted when I'm not casting magic.

The closest I've seen done in a way I didn't have a problem with would probably be in White Wolf's Mage, in that Mages need to keep up the facade of magic being fake. Magic is a break in reality that mages are the few who can manipulate this force but if a Mundane/Muggle/Pick your word of choice sees it and can't make a logical leap as to what happened, reality backlashes and it can backlash hard as it tries to warp the bend you created into something the muggle can understand.

This can largely force your group of newbie mages to try to use magic to a sort of cause-and-effect that muggles can wrap their brains around until you can find mages to let loose on.

See a muggle reaching for his gun? Entropy magic to cause a bullet's charge to degrade and misfire is probably fine. That happens. Psychokinesis to put the gun into safe mode so it doesn't fire? unlikely if they were expecting problems, but possible. Earth magic to bend the pistol in a V shape or fire magic to cause all the bullets to explode violently? not so much.

C) has always been BS in my eyes. This is a problem not because of speed of leveling, but the developer's inability to figure out what would be a proper scope of power (and by power i don't necessarily mean damage, but ability to inflict meaningful change upon the setting) for a given level is and implement it.

3.5 Fighters getting +1 to hit and a few extra HP and wizards getting access to flight & invisibility is not a problem with the leveling system in itself, but rather the devs not putting abilities where they fit the scope of play best: either the fighter doesn't have enough or the wizard was given them too fast.

slowing down the wizards leveling is largely messing around with the XP system and causes more problems then it solves to me.

It's ok if you're starting the game fresh, but what I want to run a mid game campaign?

do I say "everyone make a 7th level character", thus ruining the whole point of the slower leveling? Am I forced to go "everyone make a character worth 45000xp"? what if I don't want to use XP as my leveling metric and simply level everyone up after an adventure has come to a reasonable conclusion?

What if my character dies and roll up a new one? do they start at the old character's level, XP total or just fresh at 1st level?

Fix your game's issue with it's scope of power and keep the uniform leveling.

[lesser_minion]

There are a few conventions in TTRPGs that favour casters over non-casters, but don't specifically deal with magic at all. For example:

1. Thinking is a free action: not only can casters keep their wits about them in battle, despite this arguably being a fighter or rogue archetype feature, but they can perform difficult mental tasks effortlessly, and are able to devise complex plans in literally no time at all.
2. Nobody is ever too fast and agile to use targeted spells against in combat, even if they're inhumanly fast and agile.
3. Nobody ever plonks a ground-targeted AoE down in the wrong place.
4. Armour never defends against magic, even when the magic takes the form of an impact or a ball of flame.

(1) might be an acceptable break from reality for the sake of fun, but I find (2-4) to be completely unnecessary.

[Quertus]

It's ok if you're starting the game fresh, but what I want to run a mid game campaign?

do I say "everyone make a 7th level character", thus ruining the whole point of the slower leveling? Am I forced to go "everyone make a character worth 45000xp"? what if I don't want to use XP as my leveling metric and simply level everyone up after an adventure has come to a reasonable conclusion?

What if my character dies and roll up a new one? do they start at the old character's level, XP total or just fresh at 1st level?

Fix your game's issue with it's scope of power and keep the uniform leveling.

I agree with most of your post, but I can't quite wrap my head around this bit.

What if I don't want to have to say, "build your character off 150 points", what if I just want to say, "pick some character from literature you enjoy, and build them in this system to the best of your ability"? If you're throwing out the balancing mechanism, you don't get to complain about the balancing mechanism, except insofar as why using numbers the balancing mechanism is such a burden.

Also, using different XP tables, and having characters level at different times can be a good thing! It helps share the spotlight - when "look at the cool new things I can do" isn't competing with the cool new things everyone else gets at the same time, it helps make leveling feel special.

Of course, in my classic parties of double-digit Fighters, one Thief, and me running a Wizard, well, the Fighters didn't get to feel special that way.

Lastly, rolling up a new 1st level character if you died used to be the "correct" answer. Back then, I could enjoy running a 1st level character in a party of 7th level PCs. These days, I'm told that's crazy talk (actually, is that just a 3e thing? Would it be fun in 4e or 5e?). But, IMO, rolling up a new character at the party XP level is the "best" answer most of the time, unless your death is indicative of needing a handicap, in which case, if your character dies, you should add a bonus to the party XP as appropriate to your handicap.

EDIT:

[*]Nobody ever plonks a ground-targeted AoE down in the wrong place.

Clearly, you never played older editions with my groups - placing them correctly was a rarity.

[Max_Killjoy]

There are a few conventions in TTRPGs that favour casters over non-casters, but don't specifically deal with magic at all. For example:

1. Thinking is a free action: not only can casters keep their wits about them in battle, despite this arguably being a fighter or rogue archetype feature, but they can perform difficult mental tasks effortlessly, and are able to devise complex plans in literally no time at all.
2. Nobody is ever too fast and agile to use targeted spells against in combat, even if they're inhumanly fast and agile.
3. Nobody ever plonks a ground-targeted AoE down in the wrong place.
4. Armour never defends against magic, even when the magic takes the form of an impact or a ball of flame.

(1) might be an acceptable break from reality for the sake of fun, but I find (2-4) to be completely unnecessary.

2 and 4 in particular are things I would not have in any setup I might do, whether a new system or an adaptation/homebrew of an existing one. Spells would still need to hit and get through whatever defense was applicable.

[Tinkerer]

2 and 4 in particular are things I would not have in any setup I might do, whether a new system or an adaptation/homebrew of an existing one. Spells would still need to hit and get through whatever defense was applicable.

What a bizarre pair of terms to have an objection with. Might I inquire why spells should be guaranteed to hit? And why a ball of force wouldn't be influenced by armour? Quite curious, didn't think that you would have a problem with those.