Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[PhoenixPhyre]

Bu the very nature of wizard magic says that it is true.

If I take a spellbook from Wizard A and give it to Wizard B, Wizard B can usually learn and replicate the effects that Wizard A achieves using that spellbook. If I teach 10 wizards a spell from the same spellbook, giving them each a perfect copy for their own use, they'll be able to memorize/prepare that spell from exactly the same recipe, and probably make similar adjustments at the time of preparation/casting, depending on reigning environmental phenomenon.

That's really the core of a technology... reproducible results using the same techniques. The core of science is the reproducibility of experiments, and so long as one wizard can learn a spell from another wizard, so long as someone with Spellcraft can identify a spell as its being cast from its components, then you've got a technology.

That may be true for wizardry, but in most settings that's only a tiny fraction of all spell-casting, not to mention other magic. It very well could be that they're playing in the shallow end of the pool, where the waves are small enough that the variations can be ignored or worked around.

Spoiler: One setting's magic

Show

In my setting, the progression of active magic use went like this:

First there were two types:
* Rune magic (written symbols imbued with power by the caster), used by Titans
* Sorcery (raw elementally-attuned magic manipulated by spoken words and willpower), used by the Wyrm

The world-changing First Wish allowed a synthesis of these two--wizardry. First mastered by the high elves, it was the foundation of their empire. In the process, the First Wish shattered the power of sorcery and rune magic, leaving them the shells we see today. Bardic magic was another result of this wish.

Nature magic (mediated through nature spirits) came next, enabled by the Second Wish enacted by the cast-off high elves that couldn't (for whatever reason) learn wizardry. They became the wood elves. This wish forced the spirits to actually pay some attention to mortals, changing their natures to allow this. The wood elf rebellion destroyed the capital of the high elf empire, leaving only a crater to this day and splitting the continent.

Centuries later, humans (who were engineered by the high elves from hobgoblins) made the Third Wish, which tied the mortal races to the Great Mechanism that maintains reality, allowing devout individuals of all races to call on divine aid (divine magic).

So right now in my setting there are a whole bunch of ways to cast spells. Only one tiny subset (wizardry) is transferable between individuals, and that one is on shaky grounds--changes in the environment (physical or spiritual) often produce changes in the way that spells resonate. Thus, when you find a new spell you have to experiment quite a bit--one wizard's spell doesn't necessarily work for another. The ones that can be scribed by any wizard are the common, work-a-day ones and only represent a small fraction of all wizard spells, let alone all spells entire. The rest of the types can't be learned by one spell-caster from another--each must be discovered or granted anew.

[LibraryOgre]

That may be true for wizardry, but in most settings that's only a tiny fraction of all spell-casting, not to mention other magic. It very well could be that they're playing in the shallow end of the pool, where the waves are small enough that the variations can be ignored or worked around.

And your setting's alterations are not the core assumptions of the various editions of D&D, where 9th level spells, some of which can do most anything, can be freely learned by anyone capable of understanding those formulae. Where wizardry can be taught in academies and classrooms. In some cases, where the earliest wizards were gods, who taught the craft to mortals who have been mucking about with it for a thousand years or more.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And your setting's alterations are not the core assumptions of the various editions of D&D, where 9th level spells, some of which can do most anything, can be freely learned by anyone capable of understanding those formulae. Where wizardry can be taught in academies and classrooms. In some cases, where the earliest wizards were gods, who taught the craft to mortals who have been mucking about with it for a thousand years or more.

But even then, you're only looking at wizard spells, and not even all of them. Only 3e makes the assumption that anyone can learn wizardry if they're smart enough (which most aren't). None of the other editions did. Coincidentally, 3e is the biggest offender in the "casters rule, martials drool" category...

My setting follows the basic assumption of 5e, where being able to have spell slots is rare--a tiny fraction of humans can learn a few spells (ritual caster/magic initiate feat) without being dedicated to that trade; higher level wizards are vanishingly rare and most wizards who train their entire lives are never able to learn the higher level spells.

That is, your assumptions are the odd ones out here, not mine.

[Cluedrew]

I defiantly want one (not all the time, but for here) but the other two I have questions about. Essentially what does special and magical mean? Is Tony Stark magical because he is the only one who can get the Iron Man suit working? He may not be a fighter, but he is defiantly not a wizard.

Comic books (at least "mainstream superhero comics") are a bad example for anything, because they run on almost 100% "rule of kewl". They throw any notion of coherence and consistency out the window, and just go with whatever the creative team of the moment thinks is the very most awesome.

That said, Stark isn't the only one who can get his tech working -- his history is now rife with examples of someone stealing his tech and making their own power armor suits.

Sorry, but I fail to see how that answers the question about Tony Stark, let alone the question about special and magical. Could you go over it again in more detail? I may have missed something.

[Max_Killjoy]

Sorry, but I fail to see how that answers the question about Tony Stark, let alone the question about special and magical. Could you go over it again in more detail? I may have missed something.

OK, to be blunt about it.

The DC and Marvel universes are perhaps the sinkiest, kincheniest examples of The Curse of the Kitchen Sink ever to sink a kitchen. Almost everything in the Marvel, DC, and most other "superheroic" comic settings is total "rule of kewl" nonsense. It's an example of taking the "We don't give even a single F if any of this makes a bit of sense, we're just slapping down whatever sounds cool on the page" option.

So that is exactly where the character with tech that "other people just can't use because we said so" fits in the breakdown of options I did -- in the one where making a damn bit of sense is thrown completely out the window. He's not an example of anything.

...

As for "special and magical", I have explained what I'm trying to say there so many times and so many ways over the last six months, I don't know how many other ways I can explain it at this point. No matter how carefully and meticulously I try to explain it, somebody takes some little part of it and runs off on some completely pointless tangent.

As I said earlier...

No matter how I word it someone gets confused as to what I mean, unless I write a damn treatise every time I post. And yet people want to give me grief when I wish language was more precise, and less mushy and overlapping and vague.

My point was that it's "magic" in the sense of "outside the realm of the normally possible in that reality". Of course, if I word it like that, then someone will chime in that because magic is part of that reality, it's perfectly normal in that reality, and we end up with a 15-page tangent of philosophical naval-gazing that ends up with some nimwit trying to prove that the world only exists in our imagination and that the chair holds you up because you believe in it or some nonsense.

I could just say that the fighter in that setting is tapping into the same forces as the spellcasters, just via different means, in order to do things that people normally can't do, but I've seen that blow up into a tangent too.

...

Now, if we wanted to make some sense out of a character with tech that was unique to him and no one else, we've got two choices:

1) They've so far been able to keep it out of everyone else's hands, but technically it's something anyone could use if they had the thing and the manual (or time to figure it out).
2) It's literally magic with a tech veneer or "theme", and is enchanted in such a way that only the enchanter can use it.

[Nargrakhan]

The following stuff is not mine. It comes from a Sword World 2.0 setting I read in a Replay several years ago. I've tried finding it on the Internet just awhile ago, but either my Google-Fu is weak or it's something that didn't get uploaded anywhere I can find. I get the same problem with Tenra Bansho material that wasn't translated by Andy Kitkowski, so I'm going to try remembering what I can from the top of my head. Please bear with me for a bit.

*** BEGIN RAMBLING RECOLLECTION ***

In this setting magic is a force that allows someone to change reality and make what's impossible, possible. The origin of this force is unknown, even to the gods, because it existed before them.

The gods were the world's first inhabitants. At first ordinary mortals, they created their own society, discovered magic, and became mind boggling powerful. At some point they transcended to a higher state of existence, becoming the divine. When doing so they removed all evidence of their civilization from the planet and let the world "restart" evolution again. At this point, the gods felt it would be best to not interfere with anything and let the world progress as if they didn't exist.

In the second age, powerful creatures that would become things like dragons and demons came into existence. Like the gods they started as non-magical creatures, but after discovering magic were able to improve themselves and change reality to their whim. At some point the creatures of the second age somehow discovered the beings of the first age (the gods). There was a huge disagreement about something, and the second age creatures got arrogant and tried to overthrow the gods. Around this time magitek robots were invented (its has a lot of anime elements in the setting, so yea). The second age creatures lost -- very badly -- and were we're imprisoned, suffered genocide, or went into hiding.

At this point the gods were divided into two camps: the "good gods" felt the world should be allowed to have a third age, but this time with their guidance to prevent another war in heaven. The "evil gods" felt this was still too dangerous, the world should be scrubbed of all life, and the creatures of the first age just live out their current utopia in existential solitude without lesser races or potential rivals. Since they abhorred the idea of actually fighting among themselves, the evil gods used the world's creatures as proxies. Basically the evil gods intended to destroy the world indirectly through cultists or tricking third world creatures into freeing dangerous second world creatures to slaughter each other (who greatly reduced or severely injured, were no longer threat to the gods anymore).

The third age is when the game takes place. The "elder races" like elves and dwarves achieved civilization first, learning magic afterwards with guidance from the gods. Other species like humans and lizardmen would follow several centuries afterwards, also getting help from the gods when they figured out fire and language on their own.

Okay... so with that quick background given:

In this setting the physics of the world work a lot like real Earth. Ordinary people can only do what we can our planet. Magic comes into play when something NOT possible in our world happens. For example casting a fireball or turning invisible.

However this also applies to physical feats. For example when a swordsman suddenly dashes across the battlefield and slaughters a dozen solders in the blink of an eye... or when the same swordsman swings his sword and creates a "wind blast" so powerful it cuts down trees in a forest. The martial classes are basically casting spells without words: they are using magic to perform their anime-style attacks. Running up the side of castle walls, dashing across water without sinking, creating small craters every time they block a sword attack from another warrior. This is their brand of magic (and why they took points to use or had limited uses). "Chi" was a subset of this magic that the monk class used. The swordsman class called their own kind "Hiken" (translates to Secret Technique).

Wizards, as cliche tradition demands, did magic via chanting. While it took them longer to finish these spells (because a martial just had to swing his sword or throw her fist), they also had more variety or greater power. Sure a monk could throw fireballs, fly or teleport (again, anime influence)... but a wizard could also do this and make others invisible, or summon a monster, or halt time, or control storms, etc, etc, etc. However they needed time to do these things, whereas the monk would just make his happen with a quick yell of hadoken or a single powerup turn.

Now the way magic functioned in this setting, 99.9% of the third age population could not use magic at all. That's what made the player characters special: they were people who could. Therefore while a PC swordsman could leap dozens of feet into the air and slice giant boulders in half with a kitchen knife (a feat possible by physically enhance magic): everyday townspeople could not. At the same time, everyday townspeople couldn't learn chanting magic that wizards did. Reciting the words didn't make what need to happen, actually happen. Thus heroic wizards or warriors finding an apprentice, was a lot like a Jedi finding an apprentice: they need to be in touch with the Force (or in this case, magic). One could only use one or the other: not both (thus the the system's martial and caster divide).

This had something to do with the "evil gods" doing something in their plan to kill everyone off from the third age. Those individuals who could use magic somehow circumvented this blockage, either because good gods granted magic through themselves (divine spells), a person was born with a heritage from the second age (half-demon/half-dragon kind of stuff), or won the power lottery and bypassed the blockage through sheer luck.

The most dangerous monster races were those from the second age, because they could use both magic simultaneously: both the "instant" kind used for physical enhancement and instant energy blasts, as well as the chanting kind for more diverse and powerful effects. For example the extreme might of a dragon was from permanent physical enhancement, the fire breath was his version of an energy blast, and he could chant spells to cause serious destruction.

Player characters were targeted by minions of the evil gods, because there were a threat to their plans (thus lots of evil cultist plots). Those of half-second age heritage, were often manipulated by a second age survivor in a bid to regain power and try attacking the gods again with third age pawns.

**** END RAMBLING RECOLLECTION ***

tl;dr - Mysterious source of magic that permeates the world has more ways of manifesting itself than chanting words to create fireballs. Reality warping energy source is doing reality warping stuff when the Fighter runs across water, moves so fast it looks like he teleport, or cuts an enemy fireball in half with his sword. He's doing dispel a different way. Wizard version of a "chanted" dispel is just more versatile (like making an anti-magic field or being able to dispel more than a directed magic attack). Ordinary people in the setting are ordinary people, because they CAN'T do this sort of stuff. Only the rare 1% like player characters can do it.

Before anyone cries that's anime only garbage, He-Man was using superhuman strength to block Magic Missile, break out of Force Cage, and cutting down Chromatic Orb since the 80's.

[Cazero]

There are many phenomena in D&D that are either explicitly or clearly magical despite not being affected by antimagic fields -- in fact, within seconds of that comic going up, it was argued that it violated the rules because forcecage itself is such an effect. Other examples include golems, shadowcasters, deities, and all artifacts.

I fail to see how any of those are relevant.

Your proposal multiplies setting elements,

Enables setting elements. Wether or not they're actualy in is left at the liberty of whomever is actualy writing the setting. And that person can still put a level cap or something if those things aren't to their liking, but that call is not for generic rules to make. Especialy when those rules claim that my proposal is possible then refuse to acknowledge it.

introduces a new strength requirement to the fighter concept that wasn't there before,

I just want the rules to acknowledge that an epic superstrong person is superstrong. That's not adding a STR requirement; my point is the exact same for DEX at an epic level.

They need to be, unless you want to diverge your setting's basic "physical laws" to allow for those capabilities.

I already did that. I said metabolisms worked differently or something. Would it really impact your life if e=mc^3 and c was slower to compensate?

So if your peak physical "fighters" are performing all these increadible feats of strength and speed and endurance that are impossible for peak physical performers in our world, then you've moved the overall scale up for everyone who isn't at peak as well, and the gap isn't that huge.

That demonstration is irrelevant. The gap isn't huge enough, so I assert that it is larger in the setting to enable character concepts that rely on that gap being large.

If your "fighters" are leaping 50', then we'd expect your average peasant or laborer who does hard work for a living every day to leap say 25'. That certainly has some implications for your setting that might need to be followed through on. Even 15' would have major implications. Same for endurance, carrying capacity, etc.

Why? The average peasant isn't among the top 1% of the best people in the world. He's average.
If the Hulk was a thing in the real world, we wouldn't have mandatory injection of gamma ray in school. We would have bigger guns for the SWAT and the hope they work.
Similarly, in a world with some individual with superhuman abilities, competent authorities will resort to some of those superhuman people to handle crisis. Sounds like "adventurers". The basic premise of most games. So what changed, exactly?

Oh, there's a major difference -- "Fighter pulling magic power from chi" versus "Fighter who's just that strong" tell us two very different things about your fictional setting.

Both can coexist just fine if you would just stop spitting on the one you don't like.

No, it is in fact one solution -- if you look at the thread title, it's not "magic vs non-magic", it's "caster beats mundane", that is, "caster vs non-caster". One solution to the divide that exists in some systems between casters and non-casters is to remove the notion that only casters are "using magic", and open up non-casting magic to other sorts of characters, allowing for remarkable fantastic capabilities without causing a cascade of worldbuilding implications.

In a "caster versus mundane" paradisgm, if something qualifies as "mundane" then it doesn't use a "spell list" because those are a "caster" thing. While that doesn't imply being completely powerless, the problem doesn't care what the source of the "mundane" power is. Superhuman abilities or exceptional skill, chi or non-magical (ab)use of different physical laws, all will run in the same balancing issues caused by not having "spells". Removing "non-magic" options from the list of "mundane" things allowed doesn't really help.

[lesser_minion]

I fail to see how any of those are relevant.

Any one of those examples suffices to refute your claim that things must be non-magical in order to work in an antimagic field.

Enables setting elements.

Just one mechanism by which fantastical things may be done is sufficient to 'enable' all fantastical things one may want to make possible. Add another one and you end up with tens of thousands of words of extra rules and world-building in order to patch up all the weird interactions and edge-cases. And actually putting that work in could easily lead you somewhere you didn't intend.

I already did that. I said metabolisms worked differently or something. Would it really impact your life if e=mc^3 and c was slower to compensate?

It is waaaaay too early in the morning to be re-learning all the maths required to answer that question properly. The answer is probably "yes", though.

[Pleh]

But even then, you're only looking at wizard spells, and not even all of them. Only 3e makes the assumption that anyone can learn wizardry if they're smart enough (which most aren't). None of the other editions did. Coincidentally, 3e is the biggest offender in the "casters rule, martials drool" category...

My setting follows the basic assumption of 5e, where being able to have spell slots is rare--a tiny fraction of humans can learn a few spells (ritual caster/magic initiate feat) without being dedicated to that trade; higher level wizards are vanishingly rare and most wizards who train their entire lives are never able to learn the higher level spells.

That is, your assumptions are the odd ones out here, not mine.

Irrelevant to my original assertion that spellcasting was scientific.

Even if you are a divine caster, do no magic of your own, and just pray that cosmic beings do magic on your behalf, your character still learned how to do that either through exploratory discovery or you were handed down teaching that came from a knowledgable authority.

If you use inborn sorcery, you used trial and error to learn to summon its power on command and to not accidentally cast spells or you were taught how to do so. Even magical creatures that use magic intuitively operate by instinct, which can also be examined and explored.

There is some science to even the deepest, most abstract forms of art.

Even if magic is totally wild and chaotic, it can still be described by mortals with statistics mathematics, "do this for the best chancrof getting the spell you want."

Science represents techniques people have developed through practice, study, and experimentation to create reproducible techniques.

I don't care how you flavor them. If your characters can cast the exact spell they want exactly when they want it, there will be some teaching around this handed from caster to caster as at least a "best practices." There is the science.

Look at it another way. Spellcasting is where mortals interface with magic. Anything mortals interact with, they can examine. Anything they can examine to create reproducible techniques is science.

There's no way spellcasting is anything but science. At worst, it is a loose science that describes fuzzy trends.

[Cazero]

Just one mechanism by which fantastical things may be done is sufficient to 'enable' all fantastical things one may want to make possible.

One mechanism is enough to enable all effects, but that's beside the point. If you care about enabling character concepts, you don't need to enable more effects but more causes.

Add another one and you end up with tens of thousands of words of extra rules and world-building in order to patch up all the weird interactions and edge-cases. And actually putting that work in could easily lead you somewhere you didn't intend.

Only if the writers are talentless hacks. Mutants & Mastermind does all those interacting things trivialy by acknowledging making rules for litteraly everything is impossible and telling the guy in charge of arbitration to do the arbitration he's in charge of.

[Cluedrew]

No matter how carefully and meticulously I try to explain it, somebody takes some little part of it and runs off on some completely pointless tangent.

... {Looks back on tangent about Tony Stark.} That happens. some times you unwittingly bring something up someone just can't leave alone.

My point was that it's "magic" in the sense of "outside the realm of the normally possible in that reality".

OK, so "magic as the unusual"? I suppose it works, but the one thing it discounts that I think should be considered, which is a wizard is a wizard no matter how common wizards are. And casters have gotten pretty common in a lot of settings.

[Max_Killjoy]

I already did that. I said metabolisms worked differently or something. Would it really impact your life if e=mc^3 and c was slower to compensate?

OK, so your divergence in physical laws is "metabolisms work differently or something". What other effects does that have on the setting, if you make that change in order to allow for your new human peak, and dragons flying? And how does that metabolism "upgrade" affect the rest of the humans in your setting?

And yes, changing C that much would have some very noticeable affects.

That demonstration is irrelevant. The gap isn't huge enough, so I assert that it is larger in the setting to enable character concepts that rely on that gap being large.

Why? The average peasant isn't among the top 1% of the best people in the world. He's average.
If the Hulk was a thing in the real world, we wouldn't have mandatory injection of gamma ray in school. We would have bigger guns for the SWAT and the hope they work.
Similarly, in a world with some individual with superhuman abilities, competent authorities will resort to some of those superhuman people to handle crisis. Sounds like "adventurers". The basic premise of most games. So what changed, exactly?

Making the gap significantly larger "because training" falls squarely under the "we're just doing whatever sounds awesome, it doesn't have to make sense" option.

There are limits to what real-world human muscle and bone can do. Humans in the real world can't power lift ten tons because the human body cannot be "trained" to that point. The parts of the human body are made of things with actual physical limits that can't be trained away. Bones made of calcium have a breaking point. Muscle fibers aren't infinite in their strength. The body gives out long before getting that ten tons lifted.

So if your fictional world humans can at their peak lift ten tons overheard, then either calcium, carbon, etc, form materials of far greater strength... or humans are made of different things than they are in this world. And in either case, your "peak humans" have dragged your "average humans" along and shifted what they can do.


Now, if you really want the gap to be very big, then the alternative (as repeatedly offered) is that your "top .001%" are tapping into the same forces that the spellcasters are, just in a different way. They're using "magic", even unconsciously, to push their bodies past the normal limits. Done -- you get people leaping over walls and crushing boulders with punches, and your everyday laborers and peasants still need animals for heavy work, and footsoldiers aren't leaping over castle walls.

Both can coexist just fine if you would just stop spitting on the one you don't like.

How exactly am I "spitting on" it?

And it's not a matter of "coexisting", it's simply that the two have very different implications for your fictional world. Understanding those implications is important if you want your fictional world to be internally coherent and consistent.

In a "caster versus mundane" paradisgm, if something qualifies as "mundane" then it doesn't use a "spell list" because those are a "caster" thing. While that doesn't imply being completely powerless, the problem doesn't care what the source of the "mundane" power is. Superhuman abilities or exceptional skill, chi or non-magical (ab)use of different physical laws, all will run in the same balancing issues caused by not having "spells". Removing "non-magic" options from the list of "mundane" things allowed doesn't really help.

The issue isn't having spells, the issue is what those spells can do vs what other ways of doing things can do.

You can reduce the power of the spells, increase the power of other ways of doing things, or accept the caster vs non-caster gap.

[lesser_minion]

One mechanism is enough to enable all effects, but that's beside the point. If you care about enabling character concepts, you don't need to enable more effects but more causes.

You enable new character concepts by coming up with new things for characters to do. Not by coming up with new arbitrarily-different ways to do what they could have done anyway.

How do fighters using magic affect you in any way? What stops you from just taking whatever powers you want and just declaring that they're something other than magic? The implications of these things not being magic don't appear to matter to you, so what is the problem here?

Mutants & Mastermind does all those interacting things trivialy by acknowledging making rules for litteraly everything is impossible and telling the guy in charge of arbitration to do the arbitration he's in charge of.

Superhero games are designed to emulate a genre of fiction where rule of cool is more important than world-building. The conventions that they use are not universally applicable.

[Tanarii]

Would it really impact your life if e=mc^3 and c was slower to compensate?

Oh holy bejebus YES it would.

If you're going to say "I don't know anything about science so I can easily hand wave it away and still suspend my disbelief" just say it.

[Lord Raziere]

Oh holy bejebus YES it would.

If you're going to say "I don't know anything about science so I can easily hand wave it away and still suspend my disbelief" just say it.

Okay!

I mean I know intuitively on some level yes, its all connected, a big machine-thing that you don't tinker with or it all falls apart, but I also intuitively know that I'm not going to have fun unless I'm getting some major coolness out of my games and going into explaining one specific instance of awesome fits completely into the world around it on physics essay levels of sense is just absurd.

[Cazero]

How exactly am I "spitting on" it?

From that exact same post :

OK, so your divergence in physical laws is "metabolisms work differently or something". What other effects does that have on the setting, if you make that change in order to allow for your new human peak, and dragons flying? And how does that metabolism "upgrade" affect the rest of the humans in your setting?

You are demanding a lot of worldbuilding work to justify the header of the Fighter class. You would have ignored it if someone put the word "chi" in it.

Making the gap significantly larger "because training" falls squarely under the "we're just doing whatever sounds awesome, it doesn't have to make sense" option.

You are asserting that the concept doesn't make sense without providing an argument for your point. I'm pretty sure you can find lots of settings were it just can't work (such as the real world), but those are setting specific issues.

There are limits to what real-world human muscle and bone can do. Humans in the real world can't power lift ten tons because the human body cannot be "trained" to that point. The parts of the human body are made of things with actual physical limits that can't be trained away. Bones made of calcium have a breaking point. Muscle fibers aren't infinite in their strength. The body gives out long before getting that ten tons lifted.

You are raising an objection that have already been waived by the base assumption. It is already established that humans can grow stronger than their real world counterpart in the considered setting.

So if your fictional world humans can at their peak lift ten tons overheard, then either calcium, carbon, etc, form materials of far greater strength... or humans are made of different things than they are in this world. And in either case, your "peak humans" have dragged your "average humans" along and shifted what they can do.

You are imagining a nonsensical issue. No, I'm not faster at running since Usain Bolt broke the world record.

Now, if you really want the gap to be very big, then the alternative (as repeatedly offered) is that your "top .001%" are tapping into the same forces that the spellcasters are, just in a different way. They're using "magic", even unconsciously, to push their bodies past the normal limits. Done -- you get people leaping over walls and crushing boulders with punches, and your everyday laborers and peasants still need animals for heavy work, and footsoldiers aren't leaping over castle walls.

And you reasserts that the core concept is invalid and must be replaced by Sorcerer variants.

That's pretty much spitting on it.

The issue isn't having spells, the issue is what those spells can do vs what other ways of doing things can do.

You can reduce the power of the spells, increase the power of other ways of doing things, or accept the caster vs non-caster gap.

How does that adress my point you quoted?

You enable new character concepts by coming up with new things for characters to do. Not by coming up with new arbitrarily-different ways to do what they could have done anyway.

Okay. So let's remove Fireball from the PHB because you can burn stuff with torches, Mage Hand because people already have hands, Forcecage because walls are a thing...

How do fighters using magic affect you in any way? What stops you from just taking whatever powers you want and just declaring that they're something other than magic? The implications of these things not being magic don't appear to matter to you, so what is the problem here?

The problem is simple. When I want to make a badass normal Fighter, I don't want the DM to tell me "he only uses a sword but he's a wizard".
Not that making a Swordizard is wrong. They can even have the core Fighter mechanics for all I care. But don't pretend a setting specific issue with "realistic" humans demands the removal of badass normal archetypes.

Superhero games are designed to emulate a genre of fiction where rule of cool is more important than world-building. The conventions that they use are not universally applicable.

And yet it works better than D&D.
Probably the bloated monster manual. Or the bloated spell list. Or the rest of the fantasy kitchen sink.

Oh holy bejebus YES it would.

If you could make me a point list so I can see how awful my random example is, I could use that laugh.

[Tanarii]

If you could make me a point list so I can see how awful my random example is, I could use that laugh.

It's been 20 years since I studied physics, so I'm no longer able to give fun and interesting details off the top of my head. For starters, we probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in anything resembling our current humanoid form.

But luckily Google is a thing. I found this. It's not a dry boring treatise, but rather a fun and interesting (and blessedly short) look at what would happen just due to changes in special relatively that we immediately be aware of.

http://www.askamathematician.com/201...iles-per-hour/

Edit: the reason I found it so amusing is I did major in physics, but it was 20 years ago and I never use it for work. So I've forgotten so much of it at this point that I can happily wave my hands and ignore the apparent seeming conflicts between a bolt-on-magic system and mundane. I don't feel the need to have magic be a bottom-up rebuild, nor to make pseudo-scientific suggestions for how mundane things work.

Where I place the line of what's acceptable verisimilitude for 'mundane' varies dramatically, and depends heavily on the mechanical system in question (including which edition for D&D), and well as the genre we're going for in the campaign. Ie a 1e Oriental Adventures Campaign, a pseudo-historical 2e D&D campaign using the historical sourcebooks, a Palladium Heroes Unlimited / Ninjas and Superspies game, a 2e Planescape campaign, a 3e Kitchen Sink FR Campaign, a 4e wuxia campaign, a BECMI campaign will all place significantly different lines on what is mundane vs special/magical. (List is some major & somewhat long running campaigns friends have run that I've played in, in chronological order. Except the hsistorical thing. That's something I dabbled in running, but just mentioned in another thread, so it kept to mind.)

[Max_Killjoy]

You are demanding a lot of worldbuilding work to justify the header of the Fighter class. You would have ignored it if someone put the word "chi" in it.

No, if it were the topic of discussion, I would have asked you what the "rules" of your "chi" system are, what it can and cannot do, how it affects the wider world, etc.

You are asserting that the concept doesn't make sense without providing an argument for your point. I'm pretty sure you can find lots of settings were it just can't work (such as the real world), but those are setting specific issues.

I provided the only argument needed in the very next line of that post -- "There are limits to what real-world human muscle and bone can do. Humans in the real world can't power lift ten tons because the human body cannot be "trained" to that point. The parts of the human body are made of things with actual physical limits that can't be trained away. Bones made of calcium have a breaking point. Muscle fibers aren't infinite in their strength. The body gives out long before getting that ten tons lifted."

You are raising an objection that have already been waived by the base assumption. It is already established that humans can grow stronger than their real world counterpart in the considered setting.

To what degree, and how? Your "base assumption" lacks any explanation, the only "waiving" is the handwave involved. You're arguing by fiat.

You are imagining a nonsensical issue. No, I'm not faster at running since Usain Bolt broke the world record.

That's not what I claimed, nor even close to what I claimed... it's so far off that it's bordering on a strawman.

This isn't about a world record being broken by .01 seconds or 2kg or 1cm... It's about fictional humans who far exceed anything that the real-world human body is capable of on a basic physical level. You can't train away the basic limits of calcium and carbon, or the propagation speed of chemical signals across synapses. You need to change the basic physics, chemistry, or biology of your fictional world to allow for human beings who can run a 2 second 100 meter dash, or "clean and jerk" 5000kg, or leap over a 15 meter high obstacle, or punch boulders to dust -- and that changes all your humans, not just your "I trained really hard" humans.

You're committing a scale error -- "if training can improve someone by x amount, then training to improve by 10x amount is just as believable".

If you wanted to claim that your fictional fighter was capable of running a 10-second 100m dash, and lifting 400kg, and leaping over near-record obstacles, it would be extreme in terms of being able to achieve all those with the same body, but it wouldn't be in the realm of the fantastic or need a novel explanation more rigorous than "I trained harder than anyone ever".

If you're claiming that your fictional fighter can cut that time by more than half, lift ten times that amount, and leap over buildings, then yes, you've entered the realm of the fantastic. And having entered that realm, you have three choices.

1) your humans are different from real humans
2) performance past a certain point starts channeling "extranormal" forces that real humans don't have access to and that most humans in your setting don't have access to
3) your setting is based on "rule of cool" and you just don't care if it's coherent

And you reasserts that the core concept is invalid and must be replaced by Sorcerer variants.

Where?

Are you assuming that "magic" must equate to external visible effects, flinging spells around, making strange gestures, etc?

What word would you prefer, then, as a generic reference to "extranormal forces" such as magic, chi, divine energy, whatever?

That's pretty much spitting on it.

How is pointing out that what you appear to want is impossible "spitting on it"? You have to give up something -- even if it doesn't feel like giving up anything at all to you.

You can have your world in which "training can just make you that awesome" without any changes to the rest of the setting and without any use of anything other than "pure awesome" by your fighter character... but what you give up for that is any semblance of a coherent setting for your game or fiction. You've created a "fantasy-theme comicbook superheroes" setting. If that's what you want, then go for it, just don't pretend it's anything other than that.

How does that adress my point you quoted?

Your point was missing the entire point. The problem -- as stated in the thread title and subsequently discussed -- is the divide in some systems between casters and non-casters. There are multiple ways to address that, which have been laid out multiple times in this and other threads. This subdiscussion with you is touching on a fraction of the overall discussion at hand.

It appears that you dropped into the middle of the discussion, missed all the points made and context established before that point, and started reacting to a subthread of the discussion as if it were the entire discussion.

I'm not suggesting getting rid of non-casters, I'm laying out a set of options to deal with the caster/non-caster divide, and one option is to give up on the idea of non-casters characters as being totally without any magic (or whatever word you want to use for "extranormal power").

Another option is to scale back spellcasters such that "fighters" don't need anything fantastic to keep up -- this is probably the best option for those who want to play characters at the scale of Robin Hood, Knights of the Round Table, etc.

Another option is to build your setting from the bricks up to make those sorts of fantastic feats physically possible, and follow through with that in the rest of your worldbuilding.

Another option is to make either the fighters or the spellcasters NPCs, and focus the campaign more narrowly.

Another option is (as mentioned above) to give up on any thought of a coherent setting, and go full-on-comicbook rule-of-cool.

There are more options, as well.

The problem is simple. When I want to make a Fighter, I don't want the DM to tell me "he only uses a sword but he's a wizard".

Nothing being said here requires a GM to say that to you.

A wizard is a spellcaster of some sort, a fighter need not be in any way a spellcaster. Just because the fighter is tapping into mana/chi/universal-life-force/magic/whatever, to pull of his otherwise impossible stunts, doesn't make him a spellcaster or a wizard or a sorcerer. Crashing through stone walls, hitting multiple enemies with one swing, ripping down mighty oaks with his bare hands, etc, that's what the fighter might do with that extraordinary power, and none of those things are spells.

It's funny, while you seem to consider underlying causes to be nothing more than interchangeable fluff...

There are effectively no difference between "Fighter pulling magic power from chi" and "Fighter who's just that strong"

...you also seem strongly wedded to this notion that fighters must be utterly devoid of any "magic" (or whatever) whatsoever and that only utterly non-"magic" explanations are acceptable -- while at the same time keeping up with the most powerful things that spellcasters can do, and not scaling back spellcasters at all.

[Cluedrew]

If you're going to say "I don't know anything about science so I can easily hand wave it away and still suspend my disbelief" just say it.

How about: "I know too much about science so I have to hand wave it away and suspend my disbelief".

Because there is too much fun that cannot be had if you spend too much time worrying about how the atoms work. (Here atom being the "indivisible building blocks the universe is made from" which may not actually be the divisible atomic partials that make up molecules in our universe.)

And I apologize but I'm going to cut it off here because I have spent the better part of an hour trying to put into words my point, but I can't quite get it into worlds I'm happy with. For now I will leave it at: between scientifically correct and fun, I'll choose fun every time.

[Tanarii]

How about: "I know too much about science so I have to hand wave it away and suspend my disbelief".

Defintly applies to many people.

What it boils down to is we all have different assumptions about what's normal, and we all have to decide where we're going to draw the line for suspension of disbelief in regards to Mundane, exceptional special (wuxia for example), and clearly magical/superpower/psionic special.

[PhoenixPhyre]

How about: "I know too much about science so I have to hand wave it away and suspend my disbelief".

Because there is too much fun that cannot be had if you spend too much time worrying about how the atoms work. (Here atom being the "indivisible building blocks the universe is made from" which may not actually be the divisible atomic partials that make up molecules in our universe.)

And I apologize but I'm going to cut it off here because I have spent the better part of an hour trying to put into words my point, but I can't quite get it into worlds I'm happy with. For now I will leave it at: between scientifically correct and fun, I'll choose fun every time.

Amen. Really, just amen. Especially that last bit. It's easy to forget that we're building worlds here for players to have fun in--the fun is the primary (and highly subjective) part. World-building tools are there to support that goal. They're means, not ends.

[Cazero]

But luckily Google is a thing. I found this. It's not a dry boring treatise, but rather a fun and interesting (and blessedly short) look at what would happen just due to changes in special relatively that we immediately be aware of.

http://www.askamathematician.com/201...iles-per-hour/

Heh. They forgot to explicitly state "everything that just happens to be calibrated to light-speed was also changed to match" to their base assertions.
But then without those extra changes it would pretty much do nothing.

If you're claiming that your fictional fighter can cut that time by more than half, lift ten times that amount, and leap over buildings, then yes, you've entered the realm of the fantastic. And having entered that realm, you have three choices.

1) your humans are different from real humans
2) performance past a certain point starts channeling "extranormal" forces that real humans don't have access to and that most humans in your setting don't have access to
3) your setting is based on "rule of cool" and you just don't care if it's coherent

Dude. You already asked me that question. And I already picked 1).
And yes, I'm using fiat when saying it doesn't need to have major consequences to the specie as a whole. But then you use fiat when claiming those consequences must happen, so we're pretty much even.

What word would you prefer, then, as a generic reference to "extranormal forces" such as magic, chi, divine energy, whatever?

I don't need a word for it. I'm talking about enabling the concept of the guy who isn't using any of those.

Nothing being said here requires a GM to say that to you.

...Unless I'm mistaken, the whole point of your argument is to force the GM to pull a similar line.

...you also seem strongly wedded to this notion that fighters must be utterly devoid of any "magic" (or whatever)

I'm for the option being available, not mandatory.

[Max_Killjoy]

Heh. They forgot to explicitly state "everything that just happens to be calibrated to light-speed was also changed to match" to their base assertions.
But then without those extra changes it would pretty much do nothing.

Is it a matter of "just happens", or is it more interconnected than that?

Dude. You already asked me that question. And I already picked 1).

And then seemingly refused to actually follow through with the implications of your pick... which makes seem as if you said "1" and then did "3".

And yes, I'm using fiat when saying it doesn't need to have major consequences to the specie as a whole. But then you use fiat when claiming those consequences must happen, so we're pretty much even.

So the structural limits of bodies made out of proteins and calcium-based bones and so on, are just "fiat"? Interesting.

How is it that whatever you're changing doesn't change anything but exactly what you want to change (the limits)? How does changing what humans are made of, or the properties of what they're made of, only change that handful of people, and not everyone?

I don't need a word for it. I'm talking about enabling the concept of the guy who isn't using any of those.

And there's nothing wrong with playing a guy who doesn't use any of those, but it leaves you with several choices:

1) change humans so that the range of capabilities is higher up the scale to raise the limit for "trained hard guy" to balance what the spellcasters can do -- and follow through in your worldbuilding
2) change humans so that the range of capabilities is higher up the scale to raise the limit for "trained hard guy" to balance what the spellcasters can do -- and not follow through, thus accepting that you have an internally incoherent and inconsistent setting
3) reign in the spellcasters and other users of "magic" to balance with the limits of "trained hard guy"
4) accept the imbalance between "trained hard guy" and whatever sort of high-end 3.5e-style spellcasters (and other magic-tappers) that are in your game

Previously, you said you chose "1", but your subsequent comments all went towards "2".

...Unless I'm mistaken, the whole point of your argument is to force the GM to pull a similar line.

Nope. The whole point of my argument, repeated many times now, is that you can't have everything. Even if having a setting that's internally coherent and consistent doesn't mean anything to you, that's still what you've chosen to give up if you establish that in your setting, most humans are just like humans in our world, but a handful of them can via utterly mundane/non-"magic" means far exceed the basic raw physical limits of the stuff that humans are made of, and that this is somehow supposedly explained by "I trained harder" or "I have more willpower" or "I'm just that awesome".

Or to quote one of my favorite songs, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

I'm for the option being available, not mandatory.

OK. That really doesn't change anything, you're still asking for mutually exclusive things to be simultaneously true.

You're effectively asking for steel to normally be just like steel in our world, but then suddenly in a few special cases be like unobtainium (or admantium or mithril or your mythical metal of choice), but also still be steel and nothing but steel and totally just steel... and have this absolutely not involve "extranormal" or "supernatural" or "magic" stuff in any way at all.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

[lesser_minion]

Okay. So let's remove Fireball from the PHB because you can burn stuff with torches, Mage Hand because people already have hands, Forcecage because walls are a thing...

You might think that that's absurd, but you could delete a lot of the wizard's spell list and still be able to make recognisable wizards, and the same goes for a lot of the other casters.

[Cazero]

Is it a matter of "just happens", or is it more interconnected than that?

I didn't make the universe. How would I know?
And what does it matter in the context of a fictional universe where light and only light is slower?

And then seemingly refused to actually follow through with the implications of your pick... which makes seem as if you said "1" and then did "3".

So the structural limits of bodies made out of proteins and calcium-based bones and so on, are just "fiat"? Interesting.

Seriously?
I picked 1. That means humans are different. Those "calcium" and "proteins" you speak of would be a funny theory on a flat earth where humors define how you get sick.
Stop refusing to follow through with the implications of the "only" options you gave me and then we can talk.

[2D8HP]

....2D8HP has shared many amusing anecdotes of their old games where everyone thought Fighters were BAMF, and Wizards were wimps.

.
Thanks for the shout out!

Yeah the "paradigm" is almost all about where the dial is set for how poweful "casters" are.

In the levels that I remember people actually playing in TSR D&D, Magic Users were "squishy" and few wanted to play them (yes at higher levels Mages were more powerful, let me wait a few years for you to have a caster PC survive and level-up so you can tell me what that's like).

In WotC D&D, the "dial" is set so that Mages get more powerful much more quickly.

"Mundanes" start out more powerful in WotC D&D as well but the power "dial" hasn't been changed as much, and usually the dial isn't changed as much for "mundanes" because of verisimilitude issues, but as in @Frozen_Feet's example of Batman, or for other examples, Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Lieutenant Mike Harrigan in Predator 2 (Danny Glover's character fell through a freakin' building, and got up and continued to fight) some stories have nominally human characters take superhuman levels of abuse (as do their clothes, how do Dr. Jones pants stay intact after he's dragged under that truck?), so there's more of a range for "mundane" PC's than many think.

But it is a power dial.

Two games with a similar base of rules, Pendragon and Stormbringer show that by making Knights clearly more effective than Spell casters in Pendragon, while most wanted to roll high POW, and play a Sorcerer in Stormbringer, because of where the "dial" is set.

Still I find the whole "what to do about OP casters" hand-wringing strange, because for most of my years playing FRP games they simply weren't.

[Max_Killjoy]

I didn't make the universe. How would I know?
And what does it matter in the context of a fictional universe where light and only light is slower?

So you know the answer, it turns out that C is buried in a wide variety of fundamental constants. Mess with C, and the entire universe as we know it kinda falls apart.

So yeah, changing E=MC² to E=MC³ and then lowering C proportionally would have a very noticeable effect for all of us. Or rather, we wouldn't be here to notice it at all.

Seriously?
I picked 1. That means humans are different. Those "calcium" and "proteins" you speak of would be a funny theory on a flat earth where humors define how you get sick.

Picking 1 doesn't tell us how humans are different, just that they are different.

The calcium and proteins and whatnot aren't the core issue, they're just convenient placeholders because that's what people are made of in the real world, and represent the limits you're up against.

Whether you change the properties of those things, or make humans out of something else, whatever it is you're making humans out of has to be strong enough to allow the sort of massive upgrade in human capability you're talking about in order to allow "not magic at all no sir, but still totally fantastical". How does that not affect all the humans? Why does it only affect the humans who you want it to affect?

Stop refusing to follow through with the implications of the "only" options you gave me and then we can talk.

They're not my options, they're the only logical options.

If it appears to you that I'm refusing to follow through, that's not an issue with my comments.

[Lord Raziere]

They're not my options, they're the only logical options.

Only if you WANT to follow our universes rules and consequences. We don't have to. Thats the choice your making.

[Cazero]

Whether you change the properties of those things, or make humans out of something else, whatever it is you're making humans out of has to be strong enough to allow the sort of massive upgrade in human capability you're talking about in order to allow "not magic at all no sir, but still totally fantastical". How does that not affect all the humans? Why does it only affect the humans who you want it to affect?

Maybe training now allows to grow twenty times stronger.
Maybe natural talent now plays a twenty times bigger role and it's just a giant lottery.
Maybe you need a bit of both. In a very, very complicated mashup.
The truth is that I don't need to justify it. You asserted that all possibilities must have species-wide consequences due to how humans "are". But since the basic premise is that "humans are different", your assertion is false.

[Max_Killjoy]

Only if you WANT to follow our universes rules and consequences. We don't have to. Thats the choice your making.

Not at all -- the options are specifically laid out to NOT presume our universe, which is kinda the whole point.