Balancing Casters by Buffing Martials

[ColorBlindNinja]

was trying to follow the conversation; but the link to the races of war stuff isn't working. is it workin for other people?

You mean this link? Because I'm getting a Error 502 Bad Gateway message.

EDIT: I think that site is just down at the moment.

[ryu]

Disregard fighters.
They lack mechanical depth.
Play casters.

Did.... Did you just Haiku all over it? Well that's one method of spreading the good argument.

[ColorBlindNinja]

Did.... Did you just Haiku all over it? Well that's one method of spreading the good argument.

Wizards are red...
Fighters are blue...

I think martials suck!
And now, so do you!

[Snowbluff]

Did.... Did you just Haiku all over it? Well that's one method of spreading the good argument.

let me fix it, my meter is off
Disregard fighters.
They lack mechanical depth.
Instead play casters.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

My point there was to suggest that since there exist counters, it is easier and safer to provide broader access to those counters rather than add new ones. In particular, adding new counters that work for anyone has the potential to screw up encounter balance. Lots of monsters (e.g. giant vermin) exist in the space of big dumb bruisers and are supposed to be beaten by BFC, or otherwise negating their ability to melee. If you make it possible for big dumb bruisers to avoid being crowd controlled, those monsters become a lot more dangerous. Therefore, I think a solution that makes Fighters not be big dumb bruisers is preferable to one which makes big dumb bruiser a more effective thing to be.



I think ability damage should just not exist. Long duration conditions and negative levels handle most of what it should do (provide lasting debuffs as a result of a fight), and don't have the property of one-shotting certain classes of monster. However, it is very ingrained in the system, and trying to cut it out of the game as it exists may well be more trouble than it's worth.



I meant feats every level. If I'm expected to be taking Spontaneous Summoner or Wolverine's Rage as a feat, I should be getting a huge pile of feats. Not waiting as long as many games last to get your third feat.



I think Greenbound Summoning is at or close to the correct power level if you get one feat every three levels. At that rate, feats should be character defining or character transforming. Not "I can hit less accurately to do more damage".



That comment (like the one about the grapple rules) was meant largely in jest. People who support Spheres of Power tend to be fairly aggressive in their advocacy for using it (to the point that I've seen at least one poster explicitly request not to have it recommended as a solution). It's worth noting in this context that I've suggested a bunch of things which aren't Tome of Battle.



What possible solution to "the rules are bad" that isn't "use different rules" exists? Also, rulesets have strengths and weaknesses and can be evaluated on that basis. I personally think Spheres of Power is a bad ruleset that works towards a solution I don't like (making casters more mechanically focused on a few abilities), and it's off topic for this thread.

I don’t see how “here’s an alternate system that balances casters and martials by nerfing one and buffing the other” is off-topic, but keep in mind you can use Spheres of Might without Spheres of Power

[digiman619]

I don’t see how “here’s an alternate system that balances casters and martials by nerfing one and buffing the other” is off-topic, but keep in mind you can use Spheres of Might without Spheres of Power

Hey, now; we got him to say something positive about Tome of Battle. Let's not press our luck.

[Cosi]

This link should work for the Races of War stuff. That's to the whole thing where it was originally posted, because the version I was linking cuts off partway through the feats.

You and I are looking for different things here. One of the things I like best about feats is that they are discrete. In my mind, that sets them apart from, say, prestige classes. The Blitz feat doesn't feel like an ability that scales, but like a pile of separate abilities.

I suppose that's a reasonable position, but it's not one I agree with.

I strongly disagree. For one thing, daze is a much more powerful condition than nauseated. For another, you can force a single opponent to save several times in a single round. You never run out, and there is no opportunity cost to use the ability. Every melee character should take this feat, including dexterity-based characters.

Sure, there are ways that it's better. But there are also ways that it's worse. stinking cloud sits there passively hitting anyone in the AoE with its effect, Combat School requires you to attack to activate it. Combat School can hit multiple targets in a round, but it's fairly hard to pull off. I don't find "you never run out" to be terribly compelling, because I consider "try to exhaust the resources of the party" to be a fairly foolish tactic that mostly gets play as a way to mitigate imbalance.

Martial characters are forced to be one-trick ponies anyway (Tome of Battle excluded). The feat taxes in 3.5 are too severe for a martial character to be good at more than one thing. On the other hand, spellcasters are never forced to be one-trick ponies.

Hence why you either need to give people more feats (one feat per level, and probably some consolidation even then), or make feats bigger (like Races of War). Also give martials more class abilities.

There's a common pattern in 3.5 where an offensive option is powerful and difficult to resist via ordinary means, but is utterly nullified by a silver bullet (freedom of movement, true seeing, death ward, mind blank). The typical result is that access to the silver bullet is [considered mandatory at higher levels](http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...ry-Magic-Items).

Why isn't "having freedom of movement" the normal means for resisting movement restricting abilities? Certainly, you could weaken those abilities and provide multiple classes with chunks of freedom of movement you thought were thematically appropriate, and such a design might even be better in the abstract, but it is sufficiently better to be worth the effort of writing it?

Disregard fighters.
They lack mechanical depth.
Play casters.

Fighters have plenty of mechanical depth. They just suck ass. "Pick one of a thousand different feats ten times" is not mechanically shallow, it just never adds up to anything you care about.

I don’t see how “here’s an alternate system that balances casters and martials by nerfing one and buffing the other” is off-topic, but keep in mind you can use Spheres of Might without Spheres of Power

What part of "nerf casters" seems on topic for a thread about buffing martials? I don't go to the Spheres of Power thread and loudly proclaim that what really needs to happen is giving martials extra actions in combat, or using Races of War feats. If you had posted that people could use Spheres of Might, that would have been an entirely reasonable (if underdeveloped) contribution.

As it happens, I also think Spheres of Power tends to solve the problem of imbalance exactly wrong. It promotes casters engaging in narrow mechanical specialization, which while balanced with martials who are narrowly mechanically specialized, is throwing away the most interesting part of the game. Also, I find the tendency of Spheres of Power advocates to claim that we should replace all other resource management mechanics with Spheres of Power entirely wrongheaded. The diversity of casting mechanics that exists between Wizards, Beguilers, Clerics, and Sorcerers is good, and the goal of new content should be to expand that (which necessarily implies that new content should not explicitly attempt to be less powerful than those classes).

Hey, now; we got him to say something positive about Tome of Battle. Let's not press our luck.

The fact that you still can't tell the difference between qualified praise and criticism is deeply bizarre to me. My position on Tome of Battle has always been that it is good, but insufficient. Hence why the first post contained more information than "give people Tome of Battle".

[zlefin]

ok, thanks for the link.
interesting to read; I don't really like the way that races of war reworked the feats; while the core principles of a rework are decent, alot of the stuff felt off, and i'm not so keen on scaling by BAB rather than char level, but I guess it makes some sense for combat oriented feats. not one of the feat reworks I'd choose to use.

[BassoonHero]

Why isn't "having freedom of movement" the normal means for resisting movement restricting abilities?

The problem is that if everyone has freedom of movement, then standard BFC basically doesn't exist. I like BFC; it's the “good” kind of complexity. If it's irresistible, it's too powerful, but if everyone is immune to it, it's pointless.

A solid fog spell should be a challenge to be overcome. A challenge should involve a choice (how do I overcome this challenge?), an attempt (will I succeed?) and a risk (what are the consequences of failure?) Freedom of movement is hardly a choice; it's so much better than the alternatives that it's considered mandatory at high levels. In addition, there is no choice at the time of use; it's a passive effect. There's no attempt — it's blanket immunity, no matter the obstacle, and if it doesn't work then it just doesn't work. There's no risk at the time of use, because in most cases there is no chance of failure and no opportunity cost. There's no real risk when you buy the item, because it's virtually guaranteed to be useful in the long run.

A world where any high-level character with sense is immune to most BFC is a world where BFC is not a useful tactic. BFC deserves to be useful, because it makes combat more interesting.

it is sufficiently better to be worth the effort of writing it?

This is a matter of opinion. It's worth talking about even if — especially if — our opinions differ.

[digiman619]

What part of "nerf casters" seems on topic for a thread about buffing martials? I don't go to the Spheres of Power thread and loudly proclaim that what really needs to happen is giving martials extra actions in combat, or using Races of War feats. If you had posted that people could use Spheres of Might, that would have been an entirely reasonable (if underdeveloped) contribution.

As it happens, I also think Spheres of Power tends to solve the problem of imbalance exactly wrong. It promotes casters engaging in narrow mechanical specialization, which while balanced with martials who are narrowly mechanically specialized, is throwing away the most interesting part of the game. Also, I find the tendency of Spheres of Power advocates to claim that we should replace all other resource management mechanics with Spheres of Power entirely wrongheaded. The diversity of casting mechanics that exists between Wizards, Beguilers, Clerics, and Sorcerers is good, and the goal of new content should be to expand that (which necessarily implies that new content should not explicitly attempt to be less powerful than those classes).

Consider the following scenario: A character with magical power has a small list of abilities it uses everyday. Looking ahead, they realize that their usual repertoire won't cut it against an upcoming threat, so they prepare themselves and get a new ability they never had before to combat it. Once the fight is over, they can return to their standard layout no problem.

Why is this okay for a Sorcerer getting a Page of Spell Knowledge and not for an Incanter using a Ritual?

The fact that you still can't tell the difference between qualified praise and criticism is deeply bizarre to me. My position on Tome of Battle has always been that it is good, but insufficient. Hence why the first post contained more information than "give people Tome of Battle".

With respect, this was the first time I've ever seen you bring it up as even a partial solution. Pretty much every other time I've seen you talk about it is when someone else brings it up and you go on to poo poo it for not being enough... and then not give any suggestions yourself on what they could use instead. Even "Replace uberchargers with Tome of Battle" is a recommendation on using the system

[Dr_Dinosaur]

What part of "nerf casters" seems on topic for a thread about buffing martials? I don't go to the Spheres of Power thread and loudly proclaim that what really needs to happen is giving martials extra actions in combat, or using Races of War feats. If you had posted that people could use Spheres of Might, that would have been an entirely reasonable (if underdeveloped) contribution.

I *did* say people shoul use Spheres of Might, and only intended to suggest SoP as a potentially interesting supplement to the incomplete but helpful changes Might presents. It’s not me that saw “Spheres” and zeroed in on SoP

[Quertus]

You know, the thing I love about fighters is that they're consistent. They may only be able to do one thing - put their sword in the other being to give it the "dead" condition - but they do so with unfailing accuracy. Nothing can stop them. Except distance. And HP bloat. And AC. And DR. And flying. And incorporeal. And invisibility. And miss chance. And astral projection. And BFC. And...

Ok, so... fighters can be no-sold a great many ways. And that makes them feel not awesome. But, at least we've got the internet, and we've told these tales, and no one will ever again suggest that it's a good idea to let everyone and his brother no-sell someone, to make them feel like their abilities are garbage. Right? Oh, wait...

In other cases, I prefer to come up with mundane resistances, like using Athletics to charge through solid fog. This is fundamentally interactive in a way that buying freedom of movement is not. From the martial character's perspective, it feels a lot more awesome than spending 12,000 gp and a swift action to ignore the effect. And it's a way to differentiate characters -- the wizard uses a spell, the barbarian brute-forces it, and the rogue (perhaps) dives out of the way before the fog solidifies. A subtle benefit of this example implementation is that the action economy slightly favors the non-casters: the Athletics check can be made as part of regular movement, whereas casting a spell or activating an item takes an action of some kind.

Giving everyone and their cousin some trick to no-sell an ability just makes the ability's user feel not awesome. Look at this from the PoV of the caster: how awesome does their BFC feel when, every time they use it, their foe has a counter?

In other words, active abilities are good; negation / countering abilities like you suggest - especially when common - do the exact opposite of what your want: they reduce the amount of awesome in the world. Fighters need more active abilities to feel awesome, not more ways to make everyone else feel bad about themselves.

That having been said, I'm all for elitism, and no-selling mooks. If you want to give Fighters and Monks erratic movement class features to no-sell BFC created by casters 4 levels or more lower than themselves, that's fine. Same for Clerics and Monks getting mission from God class features to let them no-sell mind control from sources 4 or more levels lower than themselves. Or Rogues and Barbarians no-selling SA damage from sources 4 or more levels before them. Or Rogues and Monks no-selling AoE damage from sources 4 or more levels below them.

Heck, I'd even be ok with a point-buy style, where everyone got X of these, so people could roll their own themes, and my Wizard could claim to have honed his intellect and perception to such a fine focus that he, say, ignores flanking, SA damage, and illusions from sources 4 or more levels before his. Whereas your Rogue could be just so nimble that he ignores BFC, AoO, and AoE from anything 4 or more levels lower than himself.

But, IMO, the key is to make negation abilities feel rare and special. Otherwise, the people whose abilities you are negating feel, well, like the Fighter.

EDIT: and, as a rule, give these abilities to the PCs, not to the monsters that they fight.

As it happens, I also think Spheres of Power tends to solve the problem of imbalance exactly wrong. It promotes casters engaging in narrow mechanical specialization, which while balanced with martials who are narrowly mechanically specialized, is throwing away the most interesting part of the game. Also, I find the tendency of Spheres of Power advocates to claim that we should replace all other resource management mechanics with Spheres of Power entirely wrongheaded. The diversity of casting mechanics that exists between Wizards, Beguilers, Clerics, and Sorcerers is good, and the goal of new content should be to expand that (which necessarily implies that new content should not explicitly attempt to be less powerful than those classes).

I'm a Fighter. I can't contribute. This is terrible. Therefore, everyone else should be unable to contribute, too. That way, we can all be equally miserable together.

I never cease to be amazed how many times it must be pointed out that there are other, better ways to solve this problem.

[BassoonHero]

Giving everyone and their cousin some trick to no-sell an ability just makes the ability's user feel not awesome.

To “no-sell” an attack means to shrug it off completely. This is more or less the current state of affairs; fighter PCs are either flatly immune to solid fog or at most spend an action to ignore the effect (depending on how they obtained freedom of movement). This is precisely the problem that I wish to rectify. The Athletics skill shouldn't let a character “no-sell” solid fog. Rather, a skill check would allow them to move at a reduced rate. This has the key elements of approach (using your character's strength to fight force with force), attempt (a skill check), and risk (wasting your turn).

Look at this from the PoV of the caster: how awesome does their BFC feel when, every time they use it, their foe has a counter?

Flip it again. How awesome does your character feel if you have absolutely no answer to an extremely common broad class of spells? If solid fog removes you from combat for several turns at the cost of a single action for an enemy spellcaster, with no save?

Of course, if freedom of movement isn't nerfed, it's a moot point.

[digiman619]

As it happens, I also think Spheres of Power tends to solve the problem of imbalance exactly wrong. It promotes casters engaging in narrow mechanical specialization, which while balanced with martials who are narrowly mechanically specialized, is throwing away the most interesting part of the game. Also, I find the tendency of Spheres of Power advocates to claim that we should replace all other resource management mechanics with Spheres of Power entirely wrongheaded. The diversity of casting mechanics that exists between Wizards, Beguilers, Clerics, and Sorcerers is good, and the goal of new content should be to expand that (which necessarily implies that new content should not explicitly attempt to be less powerful than those classes).

I'm a Fighter. I can't contribute. This is terrible. Therefore, everyone else should be unable to contribute, too. That way, we can all be equally miserable together.

I never cease to be amazed how many times it must be pointed out that there are other, better ways to solve this problem.

First things first, you take that argument down to the farm and use it to scare off birds, because that's a huge strawman. No one is saying that we want Wizards to be brought to the level of Fighters. We've never said that. What we've said, time and time again, is that we want classes to meet at the middle. We want our characters who specialize in a given field to be the best in that particular field. We want the generalists still be able to have a wide variety of things that they can do, but we want them all to be notably worse than the experts. Because that's the level that most greatly promotes teamwork, and given that 95%+ of the time, D&D/PF is a shared experience with multiple characters, teamwork should be a core aspect.

Moreover, what "other better ways"? Other than your "Hard Mode" nonsense (no, 90%+ of players won't want to handicap themselves so you get bragging rights. No one looks for "replay value" on modules unless you're really broke and you can only afford one module to use.), what other ways have you recommended? Or to reuse an old favorite: How will giving more classes the power and versatility of Wizards break things less?

[Arbane]

Consider the following scenario: A character with magical power has a small list of abilities it uses everyday. Looking ahead, they realize that their usual repertoire won't cut it against an upcoming threat, so they prepare themselves and get a new ability they never had before to combat it. Once the fight is over, they can return to their standard layout no problem.

Why is this okay for a Sorcerer getting a Page of Spell Knowledge and not for an Incanter using a Ritual?

Why is that OK a spellcaster, but not for a fighter?

What part of "nerf casters" seems on topic for a thread about buffing martials?

Because the less powerful spellcasters are, the less brain-straining it is to come up with ways for fighters to keep up with them. If a wizard's best trick is throwing fireballs, that's easier for a fighters to equal than if their best trick is "Summon a horde of angels". And when the spellcasters' best trick is literally "Do Anything"....

[Quertus]

To “no-sell” an attack means to shrug it off completely. This is more or less the current state of affairs; fighter PCs are either flatly immune to solid fog or at most spend an action to ignore the effect (depending on how they obtained freedom of movement). This is precisely the problem that I wish to rectify. The Athletics skill shouldn't let a character “no-sell” solid fog. Rather, a skill check would allow them to move at a reduced rate. This has the key elements of approach (using your character's strength to fight force with force), attempt (a skill check), and risk (wasting your turn).


Flip it again. How awesome does your character feel if you have absolutely no answer to an extremely common broad class of spells? If solid fog removes you from combat for several turns at the cost of a single action for an enemy spellcaster, with no save?

Of course, if freedom of movement isn't nerfed, it's a moot point.

Well, there's a few issues here. First and foremost, casting Solid Fog is not at the cost of a single action, it's at the cost of a single action, and some potentially very finite resources. If all casters had all spells as at-will abilities, then this kind of move / counter-move 5d chess could make for engaging gameplay, and could be balanced accordingly. How much of an action is it worth to give how many opponents what chance of losing how much of an action? That is much easier to balance. To make it apples to apples, you could try something like giving the Fighter a permanent 4-point penalty to his Strength score, healable only by rest, for attempting to muscle through the Solid Fog. Then every move / counter move puts the characters one step closer to needing to rest, and balances the Fighter's infinite attack resources better against the caster's finite spells.

Next, there's the assumption that, if the Fighter doesn't have an answer, that it takes him out of combat for several rounds, rather than the teamwork answer of his caster buddy dealing with the issue for him - just like he dealt with the issue of "suddenly, pointy things" that threatened his caster buddy earlier.

Lastly, there's the notion of Solid Fog being used against the Fighter. Honestly, I think most of these problems would be more readily solved by having the party fight monsters exclusively, and just banning GMs from using casters as opponents. Yes, you'll get the occasional rare caster monster with BFC, but that just makes them special - oh, look, more awesome in the world, win/win!

Moreover, what "other better ways"? Other than your "Hard Mode" nonsense (no, 90%+ of players won't want to handicap themselves so you get bragging rights. No one looks for "replay value" on modules unless you're really broke and you can only afford one module to use.), what other ways have you recommended? Or to reuse an old favorite: How will giving more classes the power and versatility of Wizards break things less?

Let's break that down.

Other than your "Hard Mode" nonsense

May everyone who poo-poos "hard mode" get what they deserve: always playing with people who don't care about the fun of the people that they game with, and who never play down to the group's level.

Because, honestly, that's what I'm talking about when I discuss hard mode as a balancing technique (which, IIRC, I haven't done in this thread, nor was it what I was alluding to above, seeing as how it is antithetical to the balance techniques proposed in this thread): players caring about the fun of everyone at the table, caring about not overshadowing the other players, and choosing to find some way to create balance.

But, clearly, you don't care for that. So may you get what you want and deserve in that regard.

Or would you care to reconsider your position?

no, 90%+ of players won't want to handicap themselves

I'm sorry if your experience is that 90+% of players don't care about the group, or the metagame, and are unwilling to play to the group balance range. On the plus side, you'd only expect about 50% of them to be "above average".

so you get bragging rights

Just to spell it out for you, you're the one thinking it has anything to do with bragging rights. Might I suggest you give "thinking in terms of the fun of the group" a try.

No one looks for "replay value" on modules unless you're really broke and you can only afford one module to use.

Even counting other threads, I'm not sure where you're getting the notion of replay value for modules from. I'm equally confused by those who enjoy playing through a module multiple times.

Nor do I have a clue what the relevance of that comment is to this thread.

How will giving more classes the power and versatility of Wizards break things less?

You're conflating two concepts: broken, and unbalanced. This isn't a conversation about things being broken, only about balance. Giving everyone the power and versatility of Wizards will make things balanced. You do agree that if characters are mechanically balanced, they'll be mechanically balanced, right?

Now, there's still two little improvements to this very simple stance.

The first is, Cosi has shown the wisdom to point out that, maybe, they don't have to be equal to still be fun. To still have a role to play. So maybe exact balance isn't a strict requirement.

Second, sure, there's a few broken things that need to be fixed - whether in terms of infinite loops, or just vague rules. It's not entirely unreasonable to feel that it's like putting the cart before the horse to try to boost muggles before fixing those flaws. Thing is, most of us have quite a few years of experience with these things, and can kinda see the power level of PO casters, so we can reasonably aim for that general area, then go back to our endless debates about RAW pedantry, without losing too much in the process.

Moreover, what "other better ways"? what other ways have you recommended?

Good question.

[BassoonHero]

First and foremost, casting Solid Fog is not at the cost of a single action, it's at the cost of a single action, and some potentially very finite resources.

Such is the nature of caster-dom. Plenty of spells do absolutely nothing if the target makes their save. In this scenario, solid fog would still have a lesser effect even if the target can overcome it. Remember too that solid fog affects an area, so the caster has a lot of chances to get value out of the spell even if it doesn't flat-out remove an enemy from combat.

Next, there's the assumption that, if the Fighter doesn't have an answer, that it takes him out of combat for several rounds, rather than the teamwork answer of his caster buddy dealing with the issue for him - just like he dealt with the issue of "suddenly, pointy things" that threatened his caster buddy earlier.

This is problematic, because it requires that the caster teammate have the right answer and that they take a turn off to use it. Dispelling is not guaranteed to work. Should the caster teammate spend an action and a spell attempting to dispel so that the fighter can attempt to attack, or attempting to attack the enemy directly? Or, for that matter, simply cast a spell (like solid fog) that is guaranteed to adversely affect the enemy? Sure, the friendly thing is to dispel the solid fog affecting the fighter, but the fighter's ability to contribute shouldn't depend on teammates choosing a friendly option over more effective options.

Some people say that fighters shouldn't depend on casters at all; they should be entirely self-sufficient. I wouldn't go so far, myself. I feel that a mixed party should be most effective. But I think that every character should have answers to mitigate standard, easily accessible offensive tactics other than waiting for a spellcaster to bail them out. The problem with solid fog and other BFC spells is that nonmagical characters have no mitigation at all — no save, no way to resist or overcome the effect. Every character should have a chance.

Lastly, there's the notion of Solid Fog being used against the Fighter. Honestly, I think most of these problems would be more readily solved by having the party fight monsters exclusively, and just banning GMs from using casters as opponents. Yes, you'll get the occasional rare caster monster with BFC, but that just makes them special - oh, look, more awesome in the world, win/win!

If this works for you, that's fine, but it can't work for me. One of the best parts of 3.5, in my opinion, is that the rules are more or less symmetrical. Anything that the players can do, NPCs or monsters can do. This makes the system flexible, but it also makes the world fair in some sense: everyone is playing by the same rules. I find this to be more immersive as well as more fun. Again, this is not meant to be prescriptive.

[digiman619]

Well, there's a few issues here. First and foremost, casting Solid Fog is not at the cost of a single action, it's at the cost of a single action, and some potentially very finite resources. If all casters had all spells as at-will abilities, then this kind of move / counter-move 5d chess could make for engaging gameplay, and could be balanced accordingly. How much of an action is it worth to give how many opponents what chance of losing how much of an action? That is much easier to balance. To make it apples to apples, you could try something like giving the Fighter a permanent 4-point penalty to his Strength score, healable only by rest, for attempting to muscle through the Solid Fog. Then every move / counter move puts the characters one step closer to needing to rest, and balances the Fighter's infinite attack resources better against the caster's finite spells.

Let's break that down and explain why it's stupid. First things first, the only cost solid fog has is a standard action and a 4th level spell slot. Sure, at level 7, this is a notable cost since you've only got one 4th level slot, but this will screw over the fighter just as much at 10th and by that time the Wizard will have 3 of them. Secondly, using a spell has no interaction with your other spell slots, You can have gate in your 9th level slot or a heightened magic missile; until you have to use that slot, it has no effect on anything you do. A fighter getting a -4 penalty to strength for daring to try and interact with the game negatively effects his primary shtick as he's now 10% less accurate and does notably worse damage, especially when power attacking as they have to effectively take a -4 penalty just to break even now. It's also worth noting that his also ignores the possibility of archers or finesse builds.

Next, there's the assumption that, if the Fighter doesn't have an answer, that it takes him out of combat for several rounds, rather than the teamwork answer of his caster buddy dealing with the issue for him - just like he dealt with the issue of "suddenly, pointy things" that threatened his caster buddy earlier.

Except the even at low levels, the "Wizard stuck in melee" has things they can do. The Fighter vs solid fog (or even worse, vs wall of wind) has no options. They are stuck until the caster deigns to help them, even assuming they can in the first place; there are plenty of scenarios that might prevent the caster from helping here.

Lastly, there's the notion of Solid Fog being used against the Fighter. Honestly, I think most of these problems would be more readily solved by having the party fight monsters exclusively, and just banning GMs from using casters as opponents. Yes, you'll get the occasional rare caster monster with BFC, but that just makes them special - oh, look, more awesome in the world, win/win!

Except this is 3.5 we're talking about. This is the high water mark of caster superiority; in no edition before or since was the wizard more powerful at almost every level. Magic has few if any countermeasures, and the few that exist are also magic. Suggesting that we stop having them face magic in opposition is a) not going to make the Wizard any more balanced, and b) increasingly harder to do as the game progresses.

Let's break that down.

May everyone who poo-poos "hard mode" get what they deserve: always playing with people who don't care about the fun of the people that they game with, and who never play down to the group's level.

Because, honestly, that's what I'm talking about when I discuss hard mode as a balancing technique (which, IIRC, I haven't done in this thread, nor was it what I was alluding to above, seeing as how it is antithetical to the balance techniques proposed in this thread): players caring about the fun of everyone at the table, caring about not overshadowing the other players, and choosing to find some way to create balance.

But, clearly, you don't care for that. So may you get what you want and deserve in that regard.

Or would you care to reconsider your position?

I never said that you should take a selfish "my fun is the only fun that matters" mentality to the game. It's totally fine to for those with more system mastery to hold back for the good of the group if that's what they want. It's your idea that we should somehow cater to that by making "hard mode" classes that makes no sense, and the fact that your two favorite characters were "intentionally sandbagged for character reasons Wizard that still was the party MVP" and "totally overshadowed in 95% of the game Fighter who was fun because of the 5% of the time I was useful." still confuses me.

I'm sorry if your experience is that 90+% of players don't care about the group, or the metagame, and are unwilling to play to the group balance range. On the plus side, you'd only expect about 50% of them to be "above average".

Just to spell it out for you, you're the one thinking it has anything to do with bragging rights. Might I suggest you give "thinking in terms of the fun of the group" a try.

You're the one who's interested in making D&D a Self-Imposed Challenge. That kind of handicapping can only be detrimental on the rest of the party.

Even counting other threads, I'm not sure where you're getting the notion of replay value for modules from. I'm equally confused by those who enjoy playing through a module multiple times.

Nor do I have a clue what the relevance of that comment is to this thread.

I seem to recall you talking about how hard mode increases the "replay value" of the game, but looking back, you meant "Playing a Wizard again" rather than "Playing The Lost Caverns of Tsojecanth again". My bad.

You're conflating two concepts: broken, and unbalanced. This isn't a conversation about things being broken, only about balance. Giving everyone the power and versatility of Wizards will make things balanced. You do agree that if characters are mechanically balanced, they'll be mechanically balanced, right?

Yes, though that doesn't mean that if the problem with the seesaw is that there's a 750 lb rock on one end that the solution is to put a 750 on the other end.

Now, there's still two little improvements to this very simple stance.

The first is, Cosi has shown the wisdom to point out that, maybe, they don't have to be equal to still be fun. To still have a role to play. So maybe exact balance isn't a strict requirement.

Second, sure, there's a few broken things that need to be fixed - whether in terms of infinite loops, or just vague rules. It's not entirely unreasonable to feel that it's like putting the cart before the horse to try to boost muggles before fixing those flaws. Thing is, most of us have quite a few years of experience with these things, and can kinda see the power level of PO casters, so we can reasonably aim for that general area, then go back to our endless debates about RAW pedantry, without losing too much in the process.

First, it's totally fine that the Ideal Fighter will have a different niche than the Ideal Wizard. The thing is that whatever the niche of the Ideal Fighter is, it has to be as important as the niche of the Fixed Wizard. Just looking at the monsters, it's clear that a major rewrite is needed in order to them to be remotely effective at high level play as pretty much every CR 15+ monster a) has multiple SLAs b) is a full-blown caster themselves c) has huge anti-magic countermeasures or c) some combination of the above. There's nothing that they can do to interact with these enemies in any meaningful way.

Good question.

That's not an answer. Even if I accepted your "Hard Mode" ideal, that's not an "other better way". It'd be a perfectly viable one, but why is "I am unhappy with the current set-up, let me look for and/or design something better" inherently inferior to "Sure, the game's not perfect, but you'll grow accustomed to its flaws soon enough and if you twist it like this and squint, we can get something fun out if it"?

[upho]

I disagree that those abilities are thematically unlinked.

Having had a more thorough look at the complete list, I must say I sorta share BassoonHero's concern. Not so much that their level abilities aren't thematically linked (although that's also a problem in a few cases), but rather that many level benefits are thematically and/or mechanically cross-linked between feats that otherwise have little in common. Meaning it's easy to end up with a pile of these feats which only provide one or two benefits of any real value to whatever it is you do in combat. While this of course doesn't mean they're less useful than normal feats, I feel it kinda it defeats one of their main purposes.

Again, I think "free Intimidate" matches pretty well to "reckless aggression". Certain, you could give away the final ability earlier or for free, but I don' think that's required.

I also don't really see the problem with the theme here, but I do believe it's also an example of a benefit which actually could fit equally well with many of the other melee related feats. I would've preferred a proper demoralization-themed feat instead, and the same goes for most of the other benefits suffering the most from this kind of problem.

Honestly, I think a far better solution would be to let the player choose the scaling benefits from a short list of say two to five options related to the initial benefit, sorta like the PF ranger's combat style feats feature. In this case, the more generic benefits - like the free action Intimidate - could of course be put in the +6 or +11 bab list of options of more than one feat.

Also, many of the feats are unfortunately poorly written, as if they haven't been properly vetted and play tested, often using inconsistent and vague wording and lacking explanations of how to solve pretty obvious contradictions, on top of allowing for combos with powerful and seemingly unintended effects. For example, at +11 bab, PBS + Mage Slayer + Whirlwind + Sniper grants the ability to threaten as normal out to 60' with any ranged weapon (except enemies provoke when entering squares instead of leaving), and enemies cannot cast defensively within that range and treat all damage as ongoing from same source when making concentration checks. So pretty damn nasty for casters, especially when combined with some targeting abilities/buffs, ranged debuffs, additional AoOs (Horde Breaker) and/or damage boosts. Note also how thematically and mechanically disconnected the seemingly melee focused Mage Slayer and Whirlwind - not to mention Horde Breaker if added for additional AoOs - are with PBS and Sniper, yet one or two of these feats' benefits have fantastic mechanical synergy with the two ranged feats.

So even if not making any major changes to these feats, much of their wording and mechanics still need to be sharpened up IMO.

I'm not really sure what you think is broken about Combat School. It's good, and I could see maybe swapping the daze with either the +11 or the +16, but I don't think it's broken. Dazing on your attacks doesn't seem much more deadly than dropping a stinking cloud on a fight.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it broken, but it's certainly OP. Especially when combined with reach, TWF and/or the iterative attack rules these feats were intended to be used with (max -5 penalty for all iteratives, or -2 with Blitz @ bab +6).

Try running the numbers of a basic high Str build, like say a barb, using this with TWF and Blitz against some level-appropriate enemies. Already at 6th level, such a barb's full attack will likely be at the very least +16/+16/+14/+14, each triggering a DC 20+ Fort or 1 round daze, on top of quite a bit of damage. So I think you'll find the barb will on average remove about twice as many enemy actions as those he needs to spend to achieve the effect at 6th level, and more during later levels as he gains additional attacks and each attack and daze attempt gains greater success probabilities.

This will typically be true also in a real game, making this ability an exceptionally great trade in the action economy. Especially since using it doesn't otherwise hamper normal combat effectiveness in any regard, meaning aside from the initial insignificant opportunity cost, there's no trade-off whatsoever to use it constantly. In short, I think it's a rare example of the limited vs. unlimited abilities balance issue where the unlimited has advantage, at least in most adventuring days including combat other than perhaps a single encounter against a few strong enemies.

That said, being limited to melee is of course likely to put a damper on this cheese fiesta, especially in later levels. So it may be enough to simply have this benefit switch places with the +11 benefit, limit the daze duration to "until the start of your next turn", and perhaps introduce a scaling max number of enemies affected/round limit. Personally, I also wouldn't mind seeing an active trade-off for using this ability, preferably in the form of a damage reduction, possibly decided by the player and reflected in the save DC. You know, making it a meaningful tactical option instead of yet another constant martial attack ability.

But aside from the implementation, I really like the concept of truly useful melee debuff/control options. Precisely what is desperately needed in order to pump up the effectiveness of martials in combat roles other than striker.

As a sidenote, PF has a feat, Dazing Assault, with a very similar benefit, except it requires bab +11 (and Power Attack), imposes a -5 attack penalty on all attacks during the round, the Fort save DC is a typically much lower 10 + bab, and last but not least the daze only lasts until your next turn. Still a very strong option in low to mid op games, despite the higher average saves of opponents in PF.

freedom of movement: I could certainly see an argument for nerfing the immunity spells, but I think that in general they provide a valuable service by preventing the game from falling into "I do my one thing" ad infinitum. If some enemies are immune to grappling/illusions/death effects/whatever, characters can't just be one trick ponies, which is desirable.

I've had great results by simply replacing immunity with a numeric bonus and/or attaching a penalty to "ignore immunity"-abilities. Makes things feel considerably less binary. One trick ponies should be mechanically sub-par regardless, and if they're not, I'd take it as a sure sign something's not working as intended.

dimension door: This spell seems totally fine to me, and I have never seen complaints about it previously.

Admittedly, I haven't had issues with this either, but I have seen quite a few posts with DMs complaining about it.

polymorph: I agree that this spell needs to be nerfed. It should probably be replaced with a choice from a menu of buffs and a disguise.

This is one of the changes I think was done mostly right in PF. Might be easiest to steal those versions.

teleportation: I have seen lots of complaints about this, but I think they are fundamentally misguided. The effect of teleportation isn't to skip encounters, it is to allow the party to only participate in encounters they want to participate in. If you are observing players using teleport to skip to the end of your adventures, that probably means that you have written an adventure whose only interesting encounter is at the end. Generally, I think most complaints about "I win" buttons and encounter bypassing come from DMs who are Dming badly. I can go into more detail if you would like.

You may be right, at least to some extent. However, when it comes to teleportation, IME skipping combat encounters is rarely the issue, nor something I've often heard about (I guess even a bad DM can often rely on player greed if nothing else). Instead, it's mostly stuff like completely ignoring physical obstacles/traps/defenses to get to important enemies/NPCs/items/places otherwise hard to get to, using scry and die shenanigans, bypassing enemy speed advantages, etc.

I'm personally also hesitant on how to "fix" this, if at all. On the one hand, teleportation is often extremely powerful in the hands of creative players, and safe-guarding a challenge from being too easily bypassed by it often means a lot of additional prep work. On the other hand, I really think player creativity should be rewarded, and tools like teleportation which allow for creative uses are often the most fun and exciting for the game. I dunno, maybe just a simple level increase may be just the thing, making the often more rare, expensive and/or higher level stuff guarding against poofaporting seem less out of place.

SoD/SoL: I think Save or Dies have advantages (4e pretty clearly demonstrated the flaws of a combat system where there's no quick way to end a fight), but I could see arguments for nerfing them. If I were redesigning the system entirely, I would probably require that targets be at half HP or lower to be vulnerable to spells that take them out of the fight. As is, I don't think the negative impact of these spells is enough to justify sweeping changes.

Not sweeping changes, I agree. Which is also a part of the problem, since such changes would probably have been easier to implement. The spells that I believe deserve attention are those that are (or are easily made into) true encounter end buttons largely in and of themselves and which can be used to great effect in a very large majority of combats with a minimum of tactical considerations, such as the aforementioned sleep during early levels and stuff like wings of flurry later on. So I guess primarily multi-target spells with devastating effects and no or low risks of friendly fire.

I also agree that one should be careful not to over-nerf and end up with boring marathon fights à la 4e. The focus should be on removing the effective but boring stuff which don't require any meaningful tactical considerations or teamwork, and especially the most universally and indiscriminately applicable such nukes which reward extremely focused spam-type caster builds (like wings of flurry).

I think that's leaning too heavily on balance point as a part of design. Yes, the Wizard and the Fighter aren't compatible because of their power gap, but that's a different question from "which one is better designed", and the answer to the design question is something that should guide us in determining which balance point is preferable. Once you stop including balance in your game design assessment, it becomes very difficult for me to imagine anyone looking at the Fighter as well designed. The Fighter ... isn't a class. It's a citation to a bunch of rules shared by all the classes. The only things that are definitively Fighter exclusive are the Weapon Focus line of feats, and those feats are both boring and garbage. I certainly think there are classes that are better design than the Wizard (even some non-casting classes), but I think the literal Fighter versus Wizard comparison is very clearly favorable to the Wizard (and I also think the abstract Mundane versus Caster comparison is favorable to the casters).

Well, as implemented in 3.5 the fighter class is clearly not as well designed as the wizard, but on a conceptual level they're also quite similar, both being basically buckets to be filled with options from subsystems which aren't class exclusive. Though I guess a better comparison to the fighter would be the sorcerer, which also more clearly shows the design problem lies primarily with the huge power gap between spells and feats, and I think that is largely a balance issue.

But admittedly, in the context of the topic of this thread, I think my point may also boil down to a largely irrelevant semantic nit-pick. It doesn't really matter if the viewpoint is more valid, since the aim is to achieve acceptable balance without having to rewrite a thousand feats and/or spells.

I think those options would allow martials to fill a reasonable variety of combat roles. Even allow characters to fight passably effectively at range is a big bump. But between those options, they afford the ability to do a reasonable variety of combat things (albeit usually mediated via damage). A martial character with those options could pull off single target damage, AoE damage, some on-attack debuffs, some buff and support abilities, and possibly trip-based BFC. Consider something like a Warblade//Marshall. You get an aura that provides some minor bonuses, the ability to grant your allies actions (both via white raven tactics and Grant Move Action), taking Horde Breaker and Whirlwind and wielding a Spiked Chain allows you to do a passable job threatening large groups of enemies, and your maneuvers give you good defenses or additional offensive options. Plus potentially some Weapon of Legacy stuff. Certainly, it's not as much as a Wizard can, but it's enough to be viable.

I may have unrealistically high demands in this particular area, but to me the problems are very much "usually mediated via damage" and "Certainly, it's not as much as a Wizard can". That said, I've built and played quite a few focused martial controllers/debuffers in PF which arguably equal or even supersede wizards in terms of pure combat effectiveness, even those pretty highly optimized for the same role and even at high levels. So I know those problems can be addressed in PF, and although it does typically require DSP options (meaning PoW and Psionics) and a lot of optimization if done according to RAW, I think it's possible to introduce a few things which should make similar builds easier to put together in PF as well as 3.5.

Spoiler: Martial Control/Debuff Abilities

Show

Thankfully, there are a few quite distinct mechanical strengths commonly shared by mentioned PF martial control builds. As can be expected, the most notable ones and some of their most significant related PF options being:

1. High special attack/combat maneuver bonus: Dueling (PSFG)/(Psionic) weapon, Leveraging weapon, barb rage, Huge+ size (metamorphosis, Large race), fiendbound marauder warder
2. Superior reach or seamless switch-hitting: reach weapon, bloodrager aberrant bloodline 4 Unnatural Reach bloodline power, long arm, longarm bracers, warder 1 Focused Defense feature, shield champion brawler 7 Throw Shield feature, Powerful Throw, formless master PrC 2 Sudden Reach feature
3. Free action riders: Maelstrom Shield, Tempest Shield, Seize the Opportunity, Savage Dirty Trick rage power, Kitsune Vengeance, Cornugon Smash, Enforcer, Greater [combat maneuver], Pushing Assault, Vicious Stomp, Ki Throw, Broken Dreams Style feat chain, Dirty Trick Master, Black Seraph’s Glare, Fear the Reaper, tetori monk 4 Graceful Grappler feature, fiendbound marauder warder 1 Fiend's Grip feature
4. Active party defense: Combat Reflexes based on Dex or a mental stat (warder 1, myrmidon fighter 1 or zealot 2), Come and Get Me rage power, swashbuckler 1 Opportune Parry and Riposte deed, Stance of the Thunderbrand, Unexpected Strike rage power, Fortuitous weapon, several warder and zealot class features, several counter martial maneuvers
5. Spell Sunder: Spell Sunder rage power (duh!)
6. Scary enough to make Cthulhu pee his proverbial pants: Black Seraph Annihilation, Soulless Gaze, Intimidating Prowess, several items

The key mechanical benefits of these shouldn't be too hard to transform into Races of War style scaling feats, while also replacing the few flat-out broken benefits (notably Soulless Gaze and Dirty Trick Master) with more reasonable ones. A few suggestions to illustrate the general idea:

Dirty Fighting
Benefit You can perform a dirty trick (see below) special attack as a standard action without provoking an attack of opportunity.
+1 You can perform a dirty trick as a move action once per round, and the duration of a condition you inflict with a dirty trick increases to 1d4 rounds.
+6 You can perform a dirty trick in place of any one single melee attack you can make during your turn, and in place of any one single attack of opportunity you can make during a round, in addition to the above benefit (for a maximum total of 3 dirty trick attempts per round). An enemy must spend a standard action rather than a move action to remove a condition inflicted by a dirty trick performed by you.
+11 Whenever you successfully perform a dirty trick against an enemy still affected by a condition inflicted by a previous dirty trick (whether your own or another creature’s), you can cause a serious condition (see below). The attack roll penalty you take when performing a dirty trick is reduced to -2.
+16 You can perform a dirty trick in place of any melee attack, and you do not take the penalty to the attack roll when doing so.

Spoiler: Dirty Trick

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You can attempt to hinder a foe in melee as a standard action. This special attack covers any sort of situational attack that imposes a penalty on a foe for a short period of time. Examples include kicking sand into an opponent’s face to blind him for 1 round, pulling down an enemy’s pants to halve his speed, or hitting a foe in a sensitive spot to make him sickened for a round. The GM is the arbiter of what can be accomplished with this attack, but it cannot be used to impose a permanent penalty, and the results can be undone if the target spends a move action. If you do not have the Improved Dirty Trick feat or a similar ability, attempting a dirty trick provokes an attack of opportunity from the target of your attack.

Make a normal melee attack with a -5 penalty, if your attack is successful, the target takes a penalty. The penalty is limited to one of the following conditions: blinded, dazzled, deafened, entangled, shaken, or sickened.

This condition lasts for 1 round. For every 5 by which your attack exceeds your opponent’s AC, the penalty lasts 1 additional round. Any additional successful attempts to inflict the same condition are added to this duration. This penalty can be removed if the target spends a move action.

If you can inflict a serious condition, you cause an opponent who is dazzled to become dazed, entangled to become pinned, shaken to become frightened, and sickened to become nauseated. This worsened condition replaces the previous dirty trick condition, and lasts for the duration of the dirty trick (including any rounds remaining from the previous dirty trick condition) or until the opponent uses a full round action to remove the condition (whichever comes first). The opponent can always take this action to remove a serious condition, even if the condition does not normally allow the opponent to take full round actions (such as in the case of dazed or nauseated).

It's... CAPTAIN ANDORAN! (or Shield Champion)
Prerequisite Two-Weapon Fighting
Benefit You do not lose your shield bonus to AC when making a shield bash with a light or heavy shield.
+1 You can make a ranged shield bash with a light or heavy shield you have donned, treating it as a thrown weapon with a 20 feet range increment. You may use the higher of your Strength or Dexterity Modifier when making this ranged attack, and the shield returns to you immediately after your attack has been resolved (regardless of whether you hit or miss). As part of this ranged attack, you remove the shield with a quick-release mechanism and secure the shield in place when it returns to you.
+6 You can perform a bull rush, disarm, sunder or trip special attack with a ranged shield bash, without provoking an attack of opportunity. You do not have to move with the opponent if you make a ranged bull rush. The shield bonus to AC provided by your shield also applies to your touch AC and Reflex saving throws (not including any enhancement bonuses).
+11 You may treat the shield enhancement bonus provided by your shield as a weapon enhancement bonus when performing a shield bash. The shield bonus to AC provided by your shield increases by +2.
+16 You may make a bull rush, disarm, sunder or trip special attack as a free action against an enemy you hit with a shield bash, without provoking an attack of opportunity.

Spell Destroyer
Prerequisite Mage Slayer
Benefit You gain a +1 morale bonus to saving throws against supernatural abilities, spell-like abilities and spells. This bonus increases by +1 when your base attack bonus reaches +6, +11 and +16, for a maximum bonus of +4.
+1 You gain a +1 bonus on damage rolls against creatures possessing spells or spell-like abilities. This damage bonus increases by +1 when your base attack bonus reaches +6, +11 and +16, for a maximum bonus of +4.
+6 Once per round, you can attempt to sunder an ongoing spell or psionic power effect by succeeding at a sunder special attack. For any effect other than one on an enemy creature, you must make a successful sunder attempt against an AC equal to 10 + the effect’s caster or manifester level. To sunder an effect on an enemy, you must succeed at an attack roll against an AC equal to 10 + the effect's caster or manifester level + the enemy's Dexterity Modifier. Your sunder attack ignores any miss chance caused by a spell, psionic power, spell-like ability or psi-like ability. If successful, you suppress the effect for 1 round, or 2 rounds if your attack exceeded the AC by 4 to 9. If your attack exceeded the AC by 10 or more, the effect is dispelled.
+11 When you successfully sunder an effect on an enemy, the enemy cannot be affected by any teleportation effects for 1 round. If you dispelled the effect, the enemy is instead bound as by dimensional anchor for 1d4 rounds.
+16 When you successfully sunder an effect on an enemy, the enemy loses 1 unused spell/day of 4th level (determined randomly if prepared) or 7 power points, as appropriate for the dispelled effect. If you dispelled the effect, the enemy instead loses 1 unused spell/day of 7th level or 13 power points. If the enemy has no unused daily spell slot of the appropriate level, it instead loses a spell of the next lower level (3rd or 6th, respectively), or the next lower level after that (2nd or 5th, respectively), and so on. If the enemy does not have enough power points left, it is instead exposed to psychic burn.

Not super sure what you mean by too much customization work. You pick from a set of menu options. As far as magic item dependency goes, it does sort of increase that, but it does so in a way that is much more in line with the source material D&D is trying to emulate. King Arthur doesn't have a +5 Holy Longsword, he has Excalibur, a legendary weapon that turns aside the blades of his enemies and entitles him to the kingship of England. In fantasy, characters do have single, powerful weapons that grant unique abilities. They don't have lots of little magic items that grant numeric bonuses. Moving to a paradigm where people have things like Weapons of Legacy instead of the assortment of items they do now is probably net-neutral in terms of item requirements, but makes characters much close to genre expectations.

To clarify, the problem I'm seeing is that IIRC Legendary Weapons used as written simply won't add more than a bit of WBL, and require players to sift through tons of options, 95% of which amount to generic enhancement bonus/weapon special ability/low CL and DC standard action combat spell crap. Now it's been a very long time since I last had a look in that book, so my memory may be failing me, but I recall being thoroughly disappointed by how little actually useful new effects it contains. You can probably easily put together a suitable thematic mix of effects, but each specific effect is still very generic in terms of both crunch and fluff. And many/most of them also require activation and/or have daily use limits, right? If so, this also adds additional moving parts to a chassis I feel is already very close to the tolerable limit in that regard.

The existing magic weapon/item effects martials really DO want and which aren't already found as special abilities or big six items are tied to more unique stuff, and those effects unfortunately aren't available for Legendary Weapons. A few PF examples: Tempest Shield, Maelstrom Shield, Hooked Massacre (in PF the spiked chain is a double weapon w/o reach), Shadowbound Chains, Giant Fist Gauntlets, Fleshwarped Scorpion’s Tail, Helm of the Mammoth Lord, Axe of Felling. You'll probably notice the common combat action economy theme.

In short, for this to actually do something meaningful, I think you need to add a whole bunch of stuff to the menu of Legendary Weapon ability options, and also rewrite as many non-free action activated benefits as possible to provide constant or passive benefits. And for the sanity of less experienced players, probably also remove a lot of pointless crap. Otherwise, to help bring martials up to par with casters, I'm having a hard time seeing how Legendary Weapons could even be as useful as simply granting freely chosen magic items of roughly equal value.

In-combat, infusions get you some basic buffs, the ability to add enhancement effects to magic weapons, a bunch of stuff that does things to constructs, spell storing item, and at high levels some BFC. All in all, basically reasonable stuff

Sounds pretty good. I also seem to recall infusions are pretty easy to use, right? If so, this should be even better.

Factotum doesn't really add that much build complexity. You can take some different skills (and if there were more non-core skills, dumpster diving for them might be a real issue), but the only real complexity is at play time when you try to find the perfect spell. It does give you spellcasting, but that spellcasting is really crappy for use in combat, and if you had access to maneuvers (or simply more effective attack actions), you wouldn't try to use it there. You would use it outside combat, but outside combat you have to give people spells because nothing else is written up with non-combat effects.

Ah, yes. I think I remember the "try to find the perfect spell"-thing, especially since the longest game I've played which included a factotum also had a sorcerer with Arcane(?)/Spell(?) Pool who behaved pretty much the same way. And both were played by perfectionist types, so yeah, a lot of dumpster diving...

I mean, I guess "psionic powers", but I don't think that fixes anyone's issues.

Probably not. That said, there may be a couple of noteworthy powers with unique effects many martials would probably love (such as the size increases granted by metamorphosis), but those can probably be offered as items instead.

Certainly there are other things you could feasibly give other characters.

The more I think about it, the more I feel having a few optional building blocks would be the best solution. But it would make balancing stuff quite a bit more complex, of course.

I almost always play some sort of spellcaster, but 4th edition actually made martial characters enjoyable to play. Outside of planning out your overall build, there isn't a lot of decision making involved in playing a martial character in 3.5. Your attacks are simple and straightforward, which can become boring if it's the one thing your character is built to do. 4E giving martial characters a variety of different maneuvers that can push or pull enemies into strategically advantageous positions, inflict status effects, or allow them to to take a blow for a nearby ally makes them a lot more interesting to play.
Martials would still be outshined by casters if you let them pick up abilities like that in 3.5, but it would add a lot of extra utility to them and make them more appealing if for no other reason than a bit of extra fun factor.

This. For all of 4e's flaws, at least melee was done better than in any other edition.

Tip: In PF PoW offers many similar mechanics using a system based on ToB. So if you feel the ToB classes and maneuvers don't quite cut it, you might ask your DM to allow back-porting some PoW stuff (which should be simple enough). I'd especially recommend the warder and zealot classes, plus for example the Eternal Guardian, Riven Hourglass and Cursed Razor disciplines for fun tactical 4e-style melee defender/controller stuff.

4th edition basically EVERYONE is a caster with a re-skinning of their abilities.

Eh...? When you say "EVERYONE is a caster" are you referring to 3.5 casters? In that case, you'd be correct, considering 3.5 spells allow for more mechanical differentiation than all classes of all other editions put together, making it kinda difficult for any class not to be a 3.5 caster in some sense. But then I cannot help but wonder what your point is.

(FYI: there's considerably more mechanical difference between say a fighter and a paladin in 4e than in 3.5, despite both being primary "defenders" in 4e. The same could be said about sorcerers and wizards, especially when considering the classes even largely share handbooks in 3.5. And while the 4e versions of the casters may be less different from the 4e martials than their counterparts are in 3.5, that is largely because the 3.5 casters play a different game than the 3.5 martials. Also, the 4e wizard is without question the strongest controller class in the game, and the 4e pally arguably the strongest defender, and you can very clearly tell them apart by seeing them in play and clearly see how neither of them can do what the other does, despite both being designed for basically just two different variants of control.)

[Nifft]

I'm sorry if your experience is that 90+% of players don't care about the group, or the metagame, and are unwilling to play to the group balance range. On the plus side, you'd only expect about 50% of them to be "above average".

The poster said they didn't want to handicap themselves.

The poster did not say that they managed to avoid handicapping themselves in spite of their best efforts.

There are a lot of bad builds played by poorly-informed players out there.

[Quertus]

@BassoonHero - I'm not ignoring you! The rest of this post just took longer than I expected. I'll try to reply to your ideas tomorrow.

Good question.

That's not an answer.

You are correct, it is not. It is an acknowledgement that you have asked a good question - probably better than you realize.

However, you have and continue to repeatedly misrepresent my position on a number of things, many of which do not seem, from my PoV, to be particularly relevant to this thread. And most of which I'm pretty sure I've not brought up in this thread.

As you are laboring under a number of false beliefs about my position, and cannot seem to separate out and discuss individual components of my position without importing the entirety of my position on gaming*, we are at a bit of an impasse. Even were I ready to answer your question (and I am not**), you would not be ready to hear my answer.

So, instead, it would seem that I will need to try to correct your misunderstandings of my position, and work to develop a dialog with you, whereby we can understand one another better, before attempting to put new information atop a hopefully much less shaky a foundation.

* which is understandable - just like with the individual components of my characters' personalities, the various components of my position are often highly related and interdependent.
** like I said, the question is bigger than you probably realized.

I never said that you should take a selfish "my fun is the only fun that matters" mentality to the game. It's totally fine to for those with more system mastery to hold back for the good of the group if that's what they want. It's your idea that we should somehow cater to that by making "hard mode" classes that makes no sense,

I really can't understand this mindset. We should allow hard mode, because it's good for the game, but we shouldn't make it easy? To me, that's like saying we should allow the Fighter to contribute, but shouldn't make it easy, and should require them to use massive optimization and splat diving to make it playable.

So, what were you actually trying to say?

and the fact that your two favorite characters were "intentionally sandbagged for character reasons Wizard that still was the party MVP" and "totally overshadowed in 95% of the game Fighter who was fun because of the 5% of the time I was useful." still confuses me.

My two favorite characters? Hmmm... My best guess is, you're talking about Quertus, my signature tactically-inept academia mage for whom this account is named, and Armus.

Quertus was decidedly not party MVP. The party MVP was the Monk, who could pretty much single-handedly solo the world, let alone whatever individual "module" / quest we happened to be pursuing, followed very closely by the party Fighter. They only kept Quertus around so that they didn't have to nit-pick their toolkit to perfection. They even joked that they'd "boot him off the island" if it weren't for how convenient his spells made traveling from place to place.

Armus doesn't match your description, at all. He was the least effective mechanical playing piece I could build, who was still party MVP by virtue of superior tactics. Not that that was terribly hard a lot of the time - in his first fight, the 7th level better builds just attacked targets chosen seemingly at random, while Armus held his attack to disrupt the casting of the Drow High Priestess. I'd explain his more advanced tactics, but, honestly, nobody's ever engaged my test of why he'd open most combats by moving to protect someone with better defenses, so I don't expect it to make sense, or be particularly interesting to the Playground.

Hmmm... Actually, it's almost like you merged the two stories, and, when you picked them apart, you got pieces of each. Quertus is totally overshadowed 95% of the time by the party Fighter and Monk, but I'm fine with his only occasional contribution, because I play Quertus for the RP much more than the G - at least, as far as the tactical combat minigame goes. Quertus is, however, nearly ideal to Engage the Exploration minigame, with more custom sights than there were published spells in core, and a strong focus on cataloging new data to publish in his books. Best. Character. For. Exploration. Ever.

Armus is mechanically overshadowed by every* character he's ever adventured with. He may only contribute 5% of what the party does, but he does so with surgical precision, making him almost always the party MVP.

So, Quertus is role-playing and Exploration, Armus is role-playing and a chance to actually play the tactical minigame without completely overshadowing the party.

Still confused why I like playing them?

* technically, when Armus was in his teens, and the new players came in at first level, there was a brief moment where that wasn't true, where there were technically less powerful playing pieces on the board than Armus. That is, until he... "aggressively redistributed" the party's "artifacts".

You're the one who's interested in making D&D a Self-Imposed Challenge. That kind of handicapping can only be detrimental on the rest of the party.

If you're talking about Armus, he was party MVP. I really don't think you can get away with saying that he was holding the party back...

I seem to recall you talking about how hard mode increases the "replay value" of the game, but looking back, you meant "Playing a Wizard again" rather than "Playing The Lost Caverns of Tsojecanth again". My bad.

Hard mode was Armus. So, senile and lacking context, I'm guessing I was talking about "playing D&D again", not "Playing a Wizard again" or "Playing The Lost Caverns of Tsojecanth again".

First, it's totally fine that the Ideal Fighter will have a different niche than the Ideal Wizard. The thing is that whatever the niche of the Ideal Fighter is, it has to be as important as the niche of the Fixed Wizard. Just looking at the monsters, it's clear that a major rewrite is needed in order to them to be remotely effective at high level play as pretty much every CR 15+ monster a) has multiple SLAs b) is a full-blown caster themselves c) has huge anti-magic countermeasures or c) some combination of the above. There's nothing that they can do to interact with these enemies in any meaningful way.

Welcome to the thread!

Sorry if I'm misrepresenting you, Cosi, but my understanding is that this - the inability of the Fighter to meaningfully contribute to oh so many challenges - is exactly why you're looking to buff the Fighter.

why is "I am unhappy with the current set-up, let me look for and/or design something better" inherently inferior to "Sure, the game's not perfect, but you'll grow accustomed to its flaws soon enough and if you twist it like this and squint, we can get something fun out if it"?

How is "let's buff the Fighter" in any way equivalent to latter, rather than the former?

[digiman619]

You are correct, it is not. It is an acknowledgement that you have asked a good question - probably better than you realize.

However, you have and continue to repeatedly misrepresent my position on a number of things, many of which do not seem, from my PoV, to be particularly relevant to this thread. And most of which I'm pretty sure I've not brought up in this thread.

As you are laboring under a number of false beliefs about my position, and cannot seem to separate out and discuss individual components of my position without importing the entirety of my position on gaming*, we are at a bit of an impasse. Even were I ready to answer your question (and I am not**), you would not be ready to hear my answer.

So, instead, it would seem that I will need to try to correct your misunderstandings of my position, and work to develop a dialog with you, whereby we can understand one another better, before attempting to put new information atop a hopefully much less shaky a foundation.

* which is understandable - just like with the individual components of my characters' personalities, the various components of my position are often highly related and interdependent.
** like I said, the question is bigger than you probably realized.

Okay. It's entirely possible i misremembered or misconstrued something you had previously said so getting everything stright here and now seems reasonable.

I really can't understand this mindset. We should allow hard mode, because it's good for the game, but we shouldn't make it easy? To me, that's like saying we should allow the Fighter to contribute, but shouldn't make it easy, and should require them to use massive optimization and splat diving to make it playable.

So, what were you actually trying to say?

I'll get more into this later, but you keep confusing player agency with character agency. Also, unless you have your "hard mode" character take NPC classes, the concept of "Here's a class that's notably weaker than <base class> that only exists so you can challenge yourself playing it" is baffling to me.

My two favorite characters? Hmmm... My best guess is, you're talking about Quertus, my signature tactically-inept academia mage for whom this account is named, and Armus.

Quertus was decidedly not party MVP. The party MVP was the Monk, who could pretty much single-handedly solo the world, let alone whatever individual "module" / quest we happened to be pursuing, followed very closely by the party Fighter. They only kept Quertus around so that they didn't have to nit-pick their toolkit to perfection. They even joked that they'd "boot him off the island" if it weren't for how convenient his spells made traveling from place to place.

Armus doesn't match your description, at all. He was the least effective mechanical playing piece I could build, who was still party MVP by virtue of superior tactics. Not that that was terribly hard a lot of the time - in his first fight, the 7th level better builds just attacked targets chosen seemingly at random, while Armus held his attack to disrupt the casting of the Drow High Priestess. I'd explain his more advanced tactics, but, honestly, nobody's ever engaged my test of why he'd open most combats by moving to protect someone with better defenses, so I don't expect it to make sense, or be particularly interesting to the Playground.

Hmmm... Actually, it's almost like you merged the two stories, and, when you picked them apart, you got pieces of each. Quertus is totally overshadowed 95% of the time by the party Fighter and Monk, but I'm fine with his only occasional contribution, because I play Quertus for the RP much more than the G - at least, as far as the tactical combat minigame goes. Quertus is, however, nearly ideal to Engage the Exploration minigame, with more custom sights than there were published spells in core, and a strong focus on cataloging new data to publish in his books. Best. Character. For. Exploration. Ever.

Armus is mechanically overshadowed by every* character he's ever adventured with. He may only contribute 5% of what the party does, but he does so with surgical precision, making him almost always the party MVP.

So, Quertus is role-playing and Exploration, Armus is role-playing and a chance to actually play the tactical minigame without completely overshadowing the party.

Still confused why I like playing them?

* technically, when Armus was in his teens, and the new players came in at first level, there was a brief moment where that wasn't true, where there were technically less powerful playing pieces on the board than Armus. That is, until he... "aggressively redistributed" the party's "artifacts".

See, I did misremember some things. Getting all the data here, I think what intended to say about Quertus was "Intentionally sandbagged and playing support next to optimized martials" rather than "was still MVP". Most players I've seen hate being on either side of this arrangement; the wizards hate being shackled with the weaker martials and never get to cut loose and martials have that they are being patronized.

If you're talking about Armus, he was party MVP. I really don't think you can get away with saying that he was holding the party back...

It's later. Armus was fun for you because he was a tactician and had great plans in directing the party in handling the foes they faced. The thing is, he wasn't the one with the ideas on what to do, you were. You used your knowledge of the system on how the various monsters worked and used it to formulate plans. Now maybe if Armus wasn't an IC tactician, you wouldn't have gone through those thought processes to get the tactics, but here's the thing: you could have just as easily mage Legus, a master tactician and BFC wizard. There was nothing on Armus' character sheet that helped him figure these out save maybe the knowledge skills (which the Wizard gets as class skills anyway).

Contrariwise, if you made Armus as your first character, your "master tactician" character would have had no good ideas to earn the moniker. He'd walk into traps and use weapons that enemies are immune to because he wouldn't know better. Because you wouldn't have known better. The entire concept only worked because of the player. In the hands of someone less experienced, it all falls apart.

Hard mode was Armus. So, senile and lacking context, I'm guessing I was talking about "playing D&D again", not "Playing a Wizard again" or "Playing The Lost Caverns of Tsojecanth again".

This was me misremembering and I already apologized about it. Moving on.

How is "let's buff the Fighter" in any way equivalent to latter, rather than the former?

You know what? That's fair. In my mind, the problems of "Fighters are underpowered" is intrinsically linked to "Wizards of overpowered", but talking about wizards isn't helpful to this line of conversation, so I guess I'll drop the topic unless asked about it.

[Bucky]

Let's look at this from a different angle.

If a Fighter could spend a bonus feat on a Sorcerer spell, castable once per day with CL = BAB, how many of them would an average mid-op Fighter take in a 20-level build?

[EldritchWeaver]

Let's look at this from a different angle.

If a Fighter could spend a bonus feat on a Sorcerer spell, castable once per day with CL = BAB, how many of them would an average mid-op Fighter take in a 20-level build?

Is it off-topic to say that 1/day abilities are bad for the single reason that you end up wondering if there is a better use of that ability in the future? Which results in risking to waste the use too early or risking to waste the opportunity, because later there is no situation where you could use it.

Otherwise, has the fighter the same rules to follow as the sorcerer like ACF and material components?

[Cosi]

not one of the feat reworks I'd choose to use.

That's entirely fair, and I'm not saying you have to use it. I am saying that a) it buffs Fighters, and is therefore a useful tool if your goal is to make Fighters more effective and b) something fairly close to it is necessary if you want to continue giving people a single digit number of feats in the game and not have casters be getting more out of feats. I think the alternative of "you get one feat every level, DMM, Natural Spell and friends are banned" is also entirely viable (though even then e.g. Weapon Focus is garbage).

The problem is that if everyone has freedom of movement, then standard BFC basically doesn't exist. I like BFC; it's the “good” kind of complexity. If it's irresistible, it's too powerful, but if everyone is immune to it, it's pointless.

freedom of movement (barring deranged readings) doesn't stop wall of stone or any of the other BFC effects that put up physical barriers. It also doesn't stop the BFC effects that put up zones that simply inflict an unpleasant condition (e.g. stinking cloud, wall of fire, cloudkill).

A solid fog spell should be a challenge to be overcome.

I disagree. You don't encounter a solid fog spell (I mean, I guess you could encounter a Living Solid Fog). You encounter some enemy that has solid fog. They probably have other abilities too. That's the challenge you have to overcome, and I think in that context it is reasonable to be largely unaffected by solid fog. Certainly, you could have some abilities (though I maintain they should be actual abilities, not skill uses) that make solid fog type effects less useful but not useless against you, but you don't have to do that.

Consider the following scenario: A character with magical power has a small list of abilities it uses everyday. Looking ahead, they realize that their usual repertoire won't cut it against an upcoming threat, so they prepare themselves and get a new ability they never had before to combat it. Once the fight is over, they can return to their standard layout no problem.

Why is this okay for a Sorcerer getting a Page of Spell Knowledge and not for an Incanter using a Ritual?

I reject the comparison. First because I think the Sorcerer should get more spells known, and second because those classes have opposite incentives in terms of their (persistently) known abilities. When the Sorcerer picks up a new trick, that trick is at full power (for whatever spell level) regardless of investment. This means that the Sorcerer's optimal play pattern is to take a variety of abilities. When the Incanter picks up a new trick, that trick is a level one effect with scaled numbers until she puts in more points. This means that the Incanter's optimal play pattern is to take a small number of abilities and put points into pumping them up.

Pretty much every other time I've seen you talk about it is when someone else brings it up and you go on to poo poo it for not being enough

That's exactly what I'm saying you don't understand. I'm not "poo poo"ing it, I'm saying that it doesn't deserve unreserved praise. And I do offer solutions, I just get told those solutions are "turning martials into casters". Since I get told that pretty much regardless of what solution I offer, I suspect that most people on this forum believe that it is impossible for anything that is not a caster to compete with casters, not just in terms of RAW effectiveness, but as an abstract design principle.

I *did* say people shoul use Spheres of Might, and only intended to suggest SoP as a potentially interesting supplement to the incomplete but helpful changes Might presents. It’s not me that saw “Spheres” and zeroed in on SoP

This was the post I first responded to:

For anyone who likes the idea of moderately nerfing casters and buffing martials, check out Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might. My group uses them along with DSP stuff and the disparity is much less.

I suppose it's possible to read that as primarily an endorsement of Spheres of Might, but it doesn't particularly look like that to me. You don't really dedicate any time to talking up Spheres of Might in particular, and you also don't have any disclaimer about your intention to point to Spheres of Power as secondary.

No one is saying that we want Wizards to be brought to the level of Fighters. We've never said that. What we've said, time and time again, is that we want classes to meet at the middle.

People aren't claiming you want to bring people down to the power level of the Fighter, they're claiming you want classes to behave like the Fighter -- have a narrow field of competence in which they are encouraged to heavily invest. You could do that at pretty much any power level. Just as you could have characters be like the Wizard or like the Rogue but at lower or higher power levels.

Or to reuse an old favorite: How will giving more classes the power and versatility of Wizards break things less?

It seems obviously true that making the gap between characters smaller will reduce the stress on the game by whatever amount you shrink that gap. I continue to reject the notion that Wizard spells are unhealthy for the game (with the exception of spells that allow MM diving, and possibly spell emulation and action economy). teleport is good for the game, and if teleport ruins your adventures you are writing bad adventures.

Meaning it's easy to end up with a pile of these feats which only provide one or two benefits of any real value to whatever it is you do in combat.

If you end up in that situation, you also have some incidental abilities that might be useful when your primary shtick is disabled, which is desirable. Maybe you took Horde Breaker to get extra AoOs, but that doesn't give you any less fear aura.

Honestly, I think a far better solution would be to let the player choose the scaling benefits from a short list of say two to five options related to the initial benefit

Gated branching requires an enormous amount of content. You might be able to produce something reasonable if you have just one level of gating and cross-list benefits, but people very often underestimate how much work you have to do to get a reasonable level of choice when previous choices influence which future choices are available.

Note also how thematically and mechanically disconnected the seemingly melee focused Mage Slayer and Whirlwind - not to mention Horde Breaker if added for additional AoOs - are with PBS and Sniper, yet one or two of these feats' benefits have fantastic mechanical synergy with the two ranged feats.

Of course the question is -- is that a bug or a feature? If people can get synergistic effects from disconnected abilities, people are less likely to hyperspecialize into a particular ability. If, for example, each of the Ubercharger feats came stapled to three other useful options for different combat styles, Uberchargers would have much less of a problem with being one trick ponies.

Admittedly, I haven't had issues with this either, but I have seen quite a few posts with DMs complaining about it.

DMs complain about a lot of things. My perception is that many of these complaints are a result of those DMs running their games poorly. If you've prepped out ten thousand years of history, but no answers for 4th level spells, either you're playing E6 or you're a bad DM.

You may be right, at least to some extent. However, when it comes to teleportation, IME skipping combat encounters is rarely the issue, nor something I've often heard about (I guess even a bad DM can often rely on player greed if nothing else). Instead, it's mostly stuff like completely ignoring physical obstacles/traps/defenses to get to important enemies/NPCs/items/places otherwise hard to get to, using scry and die shenanigans, bypassing enemy speed advantages, etc.

Those obstacles and traps are encounters too, and are subject to the same pressures as combat encounters. If you want players to navigate through the labyrinth there has to be a reason for them to want to navigate through it. That's true whether they get teleport or not. If they don't get it, they'll just find some other way around. Frankly, there's some merit to giving them a known path of least resistance. In terms of motivations, the obvious one is to notice what teleport does -- let you skip to the finish line. Remove that finish line, and teleport suddenly stops being able to skip stuff. If the players' goal is to explore the labyrinth, they're damn well going to explore it whether they have teleport or not.

Scry and Die shenanigans are mostly a function of the same thing that makes Persistent Spell broken -- temporary buffs are very strong, but have short durations, so arranging to have your temporary buffs while the enemy doesn't have theirs is overpowering. That's what you have to fix. Otherwise people will just go to whatever the next best thing is.

Bypassing enemy speed advantages doesn't really make sense to me, and is not a complaint I've ever seen. Doesn't the enemy also have teleport?

Well, as implemented in 3.5 the fighter class is clearly not as well designed as the wizard, but on a conceptual level they're also quite similar, both being basically buckets to be filled with options from subsystems which aren't class exclusive.

The Wizard's options are definitely class exclusive. Other classes get spells, but there Wizard (well, Wizard and Sorcerer) only spells. I'm willing to credit the feats that require Fighter levels (rather than the ones the Fighter can simply take as Fighter Bonus Feats) as part of the Fighter class.

Though I guess a better comparison to the fighter would be the sorcerer, which also more clearly shows the design problem lies primarily with the huge power gap between spells and feats, and I think that is largely a balance issue.

I don't think it's a balance issue that class options are better than non-class options. Ideally, the majority of your power should come from your class. The problem is the lack of Fighter class options.

To clarify, the problem I'm seeing is that IIRC Legendary Weapons used as written simply won't add more than a bit of WBL, and require players to sift through tons of options

I don't think those weapons should be counted against WBL, and I think they should probably be DM created to at least some degree. The ideal system is probably that the DM drops hints about which special magic loot you could get from which adventures and then you go on whichever adventure has the one you think is coolest.

Now it's been a very long time since I last had a look in that book, so my memory may be failing me, but I recall being thoroughly disappointed by how little actually useful new effects it contains.

Honestly I'm mostly using "Weapons of Legacy" as shorthand for "something mostly like Weapons of Legacy but with whatever changes are required to make it not suck". Note my repeated mention of removing the penalties existing weapons have on their progressions.

Probably not. That said, there may be a couple of noteworthy powers with unique effects many martials would probably love (such as the size increases granted by metamorphosis), but those can probably be offered as items instead.

I didn't mean to imply psionics wouldn't be useful. I was just point out that if your concern is characters appearing "too magical", then you probably wouldn't be happy with those characters getting psionic abilities instead.

Is it off-topic to say that 1/day abilities are bad for the single reason that you end up wondering if there is a better use of that ability in the future?

Yes. Daily use limits in general are bad. If I were redesigning the system from the ground up, everyone would start encounters with their abilities refreshed and resource management would be an in-combat activity.

[Quertus]

Okay. It's entirely possible i misremembered or misconstrued something you had previously said so getting everything stright here and now seems reasonable.

Cool.

I'll get more into this later, but you keep confusing player agency with character agency. Also, unless you have your "hard mode" character take NPC classes, the concept of "Here's a class that's notably weaker than <base class> that only exists so you can challenge yourself playing it" is baffling to me.

Ignore that it's me saying it for a moment.

Surely you've heard people on the Playground talk about enjoying the character creation minigame, or enjoying the act of optimizing a character? How they run into the problem of creating a character who was too powerful for their table? What was their solution? Quite often, it was to optimize a suboptimal chassis. They get to have the fun of optimizing, and the fun of being in balance with the party - win/win!

So, you can see how other people would appreciate these suboptimal chassis in order to "stretch their wings" during the character creation minigame, right? It's exactly the same thing for me, but for stretching my wings in other places, such as during the tactical combat minigame.

Now, what does this have to do with confusing player agency with character agency?

See, I did misremember some things. Getting all the data here, I think what intended to say about Quertus was "Intentionally sandbagged and playing support next to optimized martials" rather than "was still MVP". Most players I've seen hate being on either side of this arrangement; the wizards hate being shackled with the weaker martials and never get to cut loose and martials have that they are being patronized.

And if I were at Tippy's table, I'd cut loose (with someone other than Quertus). Instead, I play to the table balance point. And you really think people should have a problem with that?

It's later. Armus was fun for you because he was a tactician and had great plans in directing the party in handling the foes they faced. The thing is, he wasn't the one with the ideas on what to do, you were. You used your knowledge of the system on how the various monsters worked and used it to formulate plans. Now maybe if Armus wasn't an IC tactician, you wouldn't have gone through those thought processes to get the tactics, but here's the thing: you could have just as easily mage Legus, a master tactician and BFC wizard. There was nothing on Armus' character sheet that helped him figure these out save maybe the knowledge skills (which the Wizard gets as class skills anyway).

Contrariwise, if you made Armus as your first character, your "master tactician" character would have had no good ideas to earn the moniker. He'd walk into traps and use weapons that enemies are immune to because he wouldn't know better. Because you wouldn't have known better. The entire concept only worked because of the player. In the hands of someone less experienced, it all falls apart.

Oh, absolutely, Armus was all about player skills, and me stretching my wings. I never could have pulled Armus off as my first character, because I wouldn't have understood concepts like disputing spells, let alone have known or understood what his various instructors had taught him during his backstory. However, I never had Armus use information he didn't actually personally possess in making his decisions - he'd just lived more before first level than most idiot farm boys' back stories.

If I had given this tactical acumen to a skilled powerhouse, especially a high level Wizard, I would have completely overshadowed the party. What fun would that be?

Also, Armus started out at first level in an existing party of 7th level characters - he was in no position to be "directing the party", and, in fact, was openly mocked by them in their ignorance.

Spoiler: a brief history of Armus

Show

So, Armus was trained by no less than 4 mentors / groups on 4 different worlds / planes / realities. Each of these training periods ended rather... poorly.

The last didn't seem so bad. His mentor was trying to teach Armus self-sufficiently, and the value of patience or something, teaching him how to craft his own clothes, his own weapons, and his own gear. Boring stuff, really, but much better than his previous apprenticeships.

But then rumors started filtering in about how communication with a dwarven hold had been lost. His mentor (attempting to impress the value of Citizenship or something) suggested Armus go investigate the source of these rumours. Fine. Whatever.

When there were neither guards not signs of a fight out front, Armus grew concerned. Armus thought he was being clever, keeping to cover, scouting around until he found a secret entrance, carefully looking through the contents of rooms for clues as to what had happened to the dwarves. He had almost pieced together that some sort of subtle assassination force, rife with magic, must have removed the dwarves, when he stumbled across a Drow patrol, who subdued Armus effortlessly.

Armus was all too familiar with Drow, which let him realize that these were... different. They lacked the usual Drow paranoia - they weren't peering suspiciously at every shadow, weren't warily approaching intersections, weren't hardly observing their surroundings at all. In fact, they were so not on the ball, that they didn't take Armus' weapons, and didn't notice when he freed his hands from his bonds. They seemed nothing like the force that had removed the dwarves almost without a trace.

Before Armus could attempt to gather more intel, the party and the Drow patrol blundered into each other. Armus' "rescuers" deployed haphazardly, engaging enemies at random, leaving the far more dangerous Drow priestess unmolested. When she began casting, Armus used his bonds to garrote her.

... And that covers a little bit of his background, and the first round of his introductory combat.

Armus continued to think and investigate and strategize; the party just smashed down doors and put sharp objects into random fleshy bits to give the "dead" condition.

The (original) party consisted of a bunch of (then) first level characters who had been pulled off their various worlds by the gods to go handle this massive, high-level Drow invasion force.

After this adventure, the gods sent everyone home (somewhere Armus hadn't been in a long time)... Only for the whole party to be abducted from their homes once again at the start of the next adventure - this time by a wizard, summoning them to help with a little problem, IIRC. This would be the point where Armus collected soil samples from everyone's boots, and a gold coin from each of them, to (much later) use to hire a wizard to create an item capable of sending everyone home.

Lastly, as impossible as this is to believe, Armus is a better tactician than I am. I know, that's impossible, but still true. Playing Armus, I'd do things on instinct and impulse that I would otherwise never even consider; after the fact, I'd be stumped trying to figure out "why the **** did that work?".

This was me misremembering and I already apologized about it. Moving on.

Apologized? Totally unnecessary, people misremember things, but, um, thanks?

[zlefin]

cosi, do you know of other feat rework projects which do a decent job of making the mundane feats strong and worthwhile?
I could always make one myself of course, but work that's gotten others to use by being good is better.

the real problem is that any proper buff to martials requires a bunch of houserules, and there's so many different tables the houserule standards vary wildly. There's no good way to get people to agree on a standard fix. I know i've got plenty of my own that i'd use if tha'ts what the table wanted, but most haven't been tested enough.

[Andor13]

Second, the dearth of utility options available to martials, particularly outside combat. A Fighter needs something to do when the combat music is not playing. Not just because that makes his character more effective, but because extended sequences where a character is unable to act are unfun for the corresponding player, which means that for extended non-combat sequences to occur (allowing casters to use their non-combat abilities), martials need something to contribute to those sequences. The obvious solution would be to simply give martials casting, but there isn't an elegant way of doing that without also allowing them to use that casting in combat. Instead, I suggest some combination of custom Weapons of Legacy (with penalties removed), access to Infusions as an Artificer (which have few in-combat applications without access to Action Points), or a free Factotum Gestalt (which also provides some in-combat utility).

So in this setup, a martial would look something like Thor. A Barbarian/Warblade with a magical hammer that gave him lightning powers, super strength, and flight. That's the kind of character who can contribute effectively to a party comprised of a bunch of high level casters.

What, exactly, does Thor contribute outside of combat? I mean real* Thor had a chariot pulled by magical goats, so transport at least, but movie Thor?

Also how difficult is it to give out of combat magic without giving in combat magic? "Everyone can cast spells of [list] from a book, casting times are increased to 10 min per level." Done.

There are a lot of problems going into the Martial/Caster debate, most of which are there long before you ever look at the classes.

First is world building. D&D started out as a rock-soup pastiche of every fantasy book and legend that Gary Gygax was fond of, and has only gotten worse from there. Greyhawk is over crowded with Gods and the Forgotten Realms are so bad it's shocking that a daily scrum doesn't break out over which God gets to hold the Sun ala Pyramids.

The heroic fantasy that D&D was based on was filled with heros like Conan, and Fafhrd, and Arthur, and Aragorn. Now you'll note that while there were wizards in all of these books, they were not player characters, they were DMNPCs who would hand out quests, information and items and then shag off to a cave to sleep for years, or they were foes to be overcome with steely determination, steely sinews, and steely ... steel. Now fun note about DMNPCs, it doesn't matter what they can do, because they aren't going to screw up the plot, because the DM says so.

But Gary said "Screw that, I wanna be able to play these guys too." and came up with the brilliant plan of making them have to slog through several levels of being a powerless mayfly before they got to put on their god hat. Now you had PCs with all the poweres of the DMNPCs and screwing up the DMs plans is what PCs do.

So D&D wizards could do what wizards could do in every fantasy story anyone ever read (despite the fact that no single wizard in all those books could do all that), but they had some balancing narrative factors.

Then 3rd edition came along and said "Screw it, we're not building anything with narrativium anymore, let's just make a set of ground rules everybody follows and let the sim play out." And here we are.

With Wizards who can do everything because fantasy and sacred cows, and mundanes who can probably only do one thing well, because they approximate real world characters and we all know how specialization is rewarded in reality. In worlds that have had static tech levels for thousands of years, and social structures based on half-remembered tidbits from 9th grade history class, and Good and Evil as actual palpable forces (which are never, ever explained), and every God ever seen in a fever dream and nothing makes a godsdamned bit of sense but at least its not actively insulting you like 40k lore does.....

Seriously, the breadth of a single base Wizards (or Clerics) magic is ridiculous. Consider that in 3.0 it was two different skills for a Bard to know how to play both a lute and a mandolin, but a single skill to know about every spell ever. Even in 3.75 it's still two different skills to know both the general people and muckity mucks (Knowledge Local/Nobility) but Spellcraft has got you covered.

D&D wizards are based on fantasy literature wizards, but fantasy literature wizards are not characters, they are plot devices.

All of which is probably leading you to think I'm about to say "Mundanes are fine, nerf the Wizards." I'm not. You want to balance Casters and Mundanes? Stop making the Mundanes artificially retarded. Let them actually advance beyond a horrible pastiche of dark ages tech, and most of the caster advantages go away. But (I hear you say) I don't want to play steampunk/diesel punk/Shadowrun!

Fine, then actually sit down and think about your worlds. How are things structured, and do they make sense for the people inside those worlds? Consider this question which I have never, ever seen to be even touched on in any published 3e world book: What are magic item components, where do they come from, and how are they regulated?

Read "The Night of Madness" and then have a serious think about your Wizards guild, and what it does and why.

Ask why your baseline martial is the Fighter class, instead of a Warblade, or Aegis.

If someone wants to point out that RAW nothing can stop a Wizard (of high enough level) from making himself a demi-plane and then lurking there, wallowing in his sociopathic paranoia, and using divination spells to deal with every threat with perfect tactics, then great! Adrwic the Neck-Bearded did it 3,700 years ago and every now and then an apprentice wizard gets vaporized while receiving his diploma, because he had the right character traits to eventually try to pull the same stunt and become a threat to Ardwic.

The problems of D&D magic are many, but boil down to two issues, both of which make "Give everyone spells" the wrong answer (IMHO.) First, it's not that D&D Wizards can do anything that is the problem, it's that they can do everything. Fixed list casters like the Beguiler or Warmage are much better design. Or if you're going to give a single class all the options in one arena, take away from another. If spells took 1 round per level to cast, wizards would not rule the battle field. Second, magic tends to give binary solutions to problems. You can breath under water or you can't. You can plane shift, or you can't. You can fly, or you can't. Now there are often secondary ways to achieve things, that get ignored in favor of the optimal answers but who uses high level phantom steeds when they can cast fly? It would probably help to make these secondary solutions cheaper/easier to access for "mundane" characters.

A lot is conflated into this discussion, that could easily be split out (and is, there are several active threads right now, on some of this.) World building, class design, spell list design,adventure construction, and table rules and expectations.

[EldritchWeaver]

If spells took 1 round per level to cast, wizards would not rule the battle field.

In addition, wizards would suck in combat. Most combats are over in a few rounds, so either you start casting a 4th or 5th level spell in the hopes you get it off before the combat is over (and not get interrupted by someone else) and are so completely useless the entire combat or you cast 1st level spells, whose save DCs or damage or effects simply suck at high levels. I get that you want to mix things up, but this way just makes wizards or casters in general an out of combat source. Maybe they can get one spell of before the combat starts. If you do use this houserule then wizards are either cohorts or group NPCs. Actually, having every player a secondary character which is a caster would work. Assuming you get fighter players to use magic.

[ryu]

In addition, wizards would suck in combat. Most combats are over in a few rounds, so either you start casting a 4th or 5th level spell in the hopes you get it off before the combat is over (and not get interrupted by someone else) and are so completely useless the entire combat or you cast 1st level spells, whose save DCs or damage or effects simply suck at high levels. I get that you want to mix things up, but this way just makes wizards or casters in general an out of combat source. Maybe they can get one spell of before the combat starts. If you do use this houserule then wizards are either cohorts or group NPCs. Actually, having every player a secondary character which is a caster would work. Assuming you get fighter players to use magic.

Actually what happens is most all high level spells get spent summoning minions or buffing outside of combat, then straight up murdering the enemy. If SLAs and SUs are still normal this even still includes spells directly. You are not going to make casters less valuable than fighters. The gap is wider than the furthest edge of the observable universe to the opposite edge. Well... Not competent casters at least.