The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[Arbane]

As someone said in one of the many, many discussions on this topic since D&D3 came out and 'Caster Supremacy' entered the vocabulary, it's a matter of scaling. If the wizard can build their own private universe, then the Fighter should be parrying volcanic eruptions. If the cleric can bring people back from the dead regularly, then the rogue should be able to sneak into the Underworld and smuggle a soul back to life.

But thats not what we have because "Realism" must always apply... but only to player characters who don't cast spells and literally NOTHING ELSE in D&Dland.

Or, you know, disable their attacking limbs, or their movement limbs, or their "cry for help" or "perceive the world" organs, or...

Game designers lack imagination.

Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.

Things like called shots, limb dismemberment, etc. work really well for gritty games where combat should be brutal, short, and rare. Or where characters are cheap. For something like D&D (where combat is a major part and there shouldn't be major trauma if the characters are to continue), they're a mistake IMO.

But I agree that (especially in 3e) there are way too may ways to bypass HP and "win" outright. And they're almost exclusively available to dedicated spell-casters. I'm very opposed to SoD and even most hard CC abilities. They're just not fun for anyone except the privileged one who gets to do it first. And so everyone gets immunities to them as part of the entry requirement (by spell or item). Which then basically removes them from the game or leads to an escalation race.

I don't care if it's not realistic, I want combat to be fun. Which means letting everyone act. Acting at a penalty is fine, getting locked out (either merely CC'd or dead) on turn 1 isn't so fine. I'm more fine with it happening to the monsters, unless there's only one. The DM gets to play too, and usually has more pieces on the board.

[Quertus]

Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.

Things like called shots, limb dismemberment, etc. work really well for gritty games where combat should be brutal, short, and rare. Or where characters are cheap. For something like D&D (where combat is a major part and there shouldn't be major trauma if the characters are to continue), they're a mistake IMO.

But I agree that (especially in 3e) there are way too may ways to bypass HP and "win" outright. And they're almost exclusively available to dedicated spell-casters. I'm very opposed to SoD and even most hard CC abilities. They're just not fun for anyone except the privileged one who gets to do it first. And so everyone gets immunities to them as part of the entry requirement (by spell or item). Which then basically removes them from the game or leads to an escalation race.

I don't care if it's not realistic, I want combat to be fun. Which means letting everyone act. Acting at a penalty is fine, getting locked out (either merely CC'd or dead) on turn 1 isn't so fine. I'm more fine with it happening to the monsters, unless there's only one. The DM gets to play too, and usually has more pieces on the board.

My point was, 3e game designers (and many others) were quite uninventive in giving Wizards so many abilities that target so many defenses, yet failing to do so for muggles.

So, let's give PC muggle classes cool abilities that target multiple defenses, too. Let's give PC muggle classes cool abilities that give diverse status effects, too.

And, since we think it's be no fun for the PCs to encounter such SoD/SoS abilities, let's not give these abilities to monsters. If the GM adds these abilities to too many NPCs (like, say, more than one or two in a 2-year campaign), that's on them for making the game unfun for their group.

What did I miss?

EDIT: I didn't say "permanent disabled". My default duration was more like "a minute" (with maybe lesser penalties for a day). To tie this back into another conversation, the effect(s) and/or duration(s) could be tied into how much the Save was failed (or passed) by.

[Cluedrew]

This is the third time I am trying to write this post, so let's hope for the best.

I'm a big believer of systems not trying to be all things to all people, and I'm going for the "Be Bad-Donkey Space Privateers!" vibe, which doesn't really include digging up childhood secrets.

I am actually against generic systems, a certain type of generic that basically means does not conflict with a range of settings, which means lacking a lot of interesting things.* I prefer a system focused on something or a toolbox system that lets you do that focusing yourself.

* This just occurred to me, but the magic system of D&D is one of the least generic part of it. And (despite my many complaints about it) it one of the most (mechanically) interesting parts of it. Which might be why it was so overdeveloped and overwhelmed the rest of the system.

I honestly don't see why "in this setting, exceptional training makes you able to do feats that would be physically impossible in the real world, and are impossible for the bulk of the setting, but can be done by certain people with certain training" is any more weird than "magic is real", and people can see you jump 30 ft and go, wow, that is a well trained person.

Whole heartedly agree. I do not what to here about both magic and realism in your setting pitch. Accept the fantastic and let impossible things into the world or keep it grounded. I don't believe you can have it both ways.** And this is, in terms of conceptual image this might be the root problem. I am trying to look at a different part of it problem, the mechanical implementation of those concepts. Although considering how quickly people are heading back to the well worn path, maybe that is a dry well.

** Which is not to say you have to have powerful martials in the setting. But make that choice purposefully and don't pretend the other options are equal then.

That doesn't help the Wizard survive a Fireball, or Sneak Attack damage, or put them over the threshold for various spells (like Power Word…).

People undervalue what the Fighter actually gets. So let's put a GP value on it, before complaining how much they need to spend to "catch up".

I can't put a GP value on it, but again I think we could ask the 3.X sub-forum for a GP value conversion of level 20 class features.

[Florian]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm a pretty decent singer, but it doesn't matter how hard I train, I will never be able to sing the Queen of the Night's aria. Most people won't. All you need to do is say that the training ceiling for certain people is higher and you have a setting in which the vast majority of farmers need normal farm equipment, but if you happen to come into town and see a farmer dragging his plow himself, you'd say, "Wow, that's pretty cool" instead of "Wow, that is not human."

This isn't even that unusual. There are entire genres of film, book, and legend about people who get effectively superhuman skill through training. It's Sherlock Holmes. It's Robin Hood. It's Guan Yu. It's Dominic Toretto.

Compare the average high-school athlete to world record-holder for most track and field events, or look at the progression of world records... that's the range of what "inherent potential" and "training" can accomplish, despite everything we've learned over the last century or so about how the human body actually works and responds.

Now compare the world records to what would be needed for a "just training and determination, no magic, not fantastic, nope nope nope" martial character. We go from slow and fractional progression... to orders of magnitude.

Push that peak possible performance of the human body up by those orders of magnitude, and you will drag the average / mean upward of human capability upward with it, unless you just don't give a damn about a coherent setting.

"But I trained really hard and now I can leap 30 feet while dodging in mid-air during the leap, land balanced on a loose post, and kill 10 guys, just by training harder than anyone ever" IS fantastic, just as fantastic as flinging explosions from your bare hands, opening portals to other dimensions with a piece of chalk and a wall to draw on, or a Wish spell.

[Max_Killjoy]

As someone said in one of the many, many discussions on this topic since D&D3 came out and 'Caster Supremacy' entered the vocabulary, it's a matter of scaling. If the wizard can build their own private universe, then the Fighter should be parrying volcanic eruptions. If the cleric can bring people back from the dead regularly, then the rogue should be able to sneak into the Underworld and smuggle a soul back to life.

But thats not what we have because "Realism" must always apply... but only to player characters who don't cast spells and literally NOTHING ELSE in D&Dland.

On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.

Which is fine, if either:

A) they dial down the power level on magic to match.
B) they accept that those characters will be outmatched by users of magic sometimes.

What they cannot have is everything at once. Cake, or eat it, chose one.

[Lucas Yew]

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief. In the case of combat power, if you can't crush skyscrapers with singular swings of your greatsword at-will by a high "level" (à la FFVIIAC), you're definitely doing it wrong (or so the majority around where I live believes); cue the inevitable shock and awe of nearby NPC witnesses for social values changes.

[Mechalich]

Whole heartedly agree. I do not what to here about both magic and realism in your setting pitch. Accept the fantastic and let impossible things into the world or keep it grounded. I don't believe you can have it both ways.** And this is, in terms of conceptual image this might be the root problem. I am trying to look at a different part of it problem, the mechanical implementation of those concepts. Although considering how quickly people are heading back to the well worn path, maybe that is a dry well.

Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins. There are just certain power sets that the more you add to them the more awesome they become, while there are others where if you add more all you're doing is increasing the damage roll. A big aspect of this is versatility, and 'magic' tends to have nearly-infinite versatility, while something like 'swordsmanship' doesn't.

A good example of how this unfolds can be found in the FATE/ series of anime, in which you have mostly martial-based legendary heroes, but you also have a caster class, and wouldn't you know the Caster class (or heroes from other classes who can use magic of their own) has a funny tendency to hijack the narrative every, single, time. Even more broadly, heroes with powers that are wide-ranging - such at the eponymous Archer's ability to copy other people's weapons and their special attacks - are just better than someone who's power is 'awesome sword that shoots energy blasts.'

Contrast this with the Disgaea games. In Disgaea the numbers go up to stupid levels - you can make a character do 10,000,000,000 damage if you grind out the right setup - but all action takes place on a rigid grid map with defined ranges and effects. Magic is then just a different type of attack sets with its own special moves compared to axes, swords, and guns and the magic using classes aren't necessarily any better than the martial ones.

So in order to serve the purpose of mechanical balance, it's important to not simply balance outputs, you also have to balance zones of capability. This is fairly tough - various White-Wolf games were supposedly built this way and yeah...that wasn't what happened. In the context of D&D it's worse because it absolutely mandates nerfing all the Tier I casters severely. PFs Tier 3 partial casters actually do get you most of the way though, which gives you some idea of just how much you have to nerf magic to allow even fairly powerful martials (and PF's got some potent martial classes) to keep up.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

That's a consequence of how world-building actually works. Building a world using a completely new physics model intended to accommodate you fictional outputs is the kind of extreme writing challenge that only a rare breed of creator (like mathematical guru Greg Egan) is actually willing to undertake. Almost everyone else is going to take some version of the real world and then start adding layers that contain their fantastical elements and they'll either hope they can build in sufficient post-hoc justification to allow their world to make sense, or they'll just not care. The latter state is actually quite popular, especially in high magic worlds. There's a number of fantasy universes out there were everyone has magic - like the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher - and the author pretty much totally ignores how this fact and the capabilities of said ubiquitous magic would drastically distort the world because that's not the story they want to tell. There's also stories that are simply sufficient gonzo and crazed that verisimilitude nosedives in importance to the overall work - like pretty much anything ever produced by Studio GAINAX (ex. Kill la Kill).

The problem in game design is that players can, and will, test the boundaries of what a game allows and in this way break the game if at all possible. People do this all the time in video game RPGs, where exploiting your way to uber-godhood is a cottage industry on the internet (some games, particularly Diablo-style actioners, have gotten to the point where they functionally demand such manipulations from players), and the situation is worse in tabletop which at least in theory involves a much wider range of possible inputs and outputs than any video game. That means you have to actually try and create mechanics that hold up in-universe to sustain the setting. Sometimes you even have to try and do this for settings that were never intended to hold up in the first place - like the superhero genre (I'd love to see a superhero game come out and say 'look this world functions according to comic book logic, the GM is expected to outlaw and chicanery that would hurt extant themes, deal with it.')

[Max_Killjoy]

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief. In the case of combat power, if you can't crush skyscrapers with singular swings of your greatsword at-will by a high "level" (à la FFVIIAC), you're definitely doing it wrong (or so the majority around where I live believes); cue the inevitable shock and awe of nearby NPC witnesses for social values changes.

As noted above, there are players who want their Fighter, or whatever, to be that Guy at the Gym, to be "the fighting man" -- to be utterly and specifically not fantastic at all, and yet to be able to accomplish what would otherwise be impossible, all while the setting shows no signs of "normal human beings for this setting" being anything other than identical to real-world normal human beings.

There's no inherent conflict if the training for the Fighter or Rogue is similar to the training for, say, a Wizard, in that it opens up the fantastic -- that the Wizard gains the fantastic ability to cast spells, and the Fighter gets fantastic physical abilities. The inherent conflict comes in when it's claimed that a character can be utterly and specifically "mandane", but do things that are otherwise and outright fantastic in the context of the setting for the campaign.

[Quertus]

Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins. There are just certain power sets that the more you add to them the more awesome they become, while there are others where if you add more all you're doing is increasing the damage roll. A big aspect of this is versatility, and 'magic' tends to have nearly-infinite versatility, while something like 'swordsmanship' doesn't.

But the limits of the versatility of being a muggle are much greater than those of "swordsmanship". Surely game designers could have done a much better job creating muggles who could affect the plot much more effectively than someone like the 3e Fighter or Cyclops does.

[Cluedrew]

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

I mean all settings operate like real life on some level (even Alice in Wonderland), with any exceptions they need. I think D&D and its ilk make two mistakes for this conversation. 1) they make exceptions only (or primarily) for explicate magic things and not for their other archetypes. 2) These exceptions are one way, magic can act on the rest of the world but the rest of the world can't act back on magic. The only solution for magic, is more magic. This is where the "Counters Not Included" bit comes in.

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief.

I'm glad that there is some people out there that see it that way. This power games seems to be mostly a European (/North America) thing, rooted in that fantasy tradition. East Asia has many powerful (if slightly mystic) martial artists. I've read some Hindu myths where are archer threatens the ocean with a bow and arrow. It may have been magic? They blur the line a lot. Like if you are the spirit of wind, is causing a storm a martial thing or a caster thing. I suppose that is another way to solve the issue, everyone is both. Or course the martial side still has to account for something for it to feel like both.

Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins.

Yeah, but they are not supposed to be equal. Power gaps are part of superhero fiction. And if you want to write a story about that, or everyone teaming up to face Caster in FATE/ go ahead. But I don't think D&D is supposed to be that story so it becomes a problem.

Also I agree with your point that you cannot rely on narrative structure to limit casters, which is how many stories do it.

[Max_Killjoy]

I mean all settings operate like real life on some level (even Alice in Wonderland), with any exceptions they need. I think D&D and its ilk make two mistakes for this conversation. 1) they make exceptions only (or primarily) for explicate magic things and not for their other archetypes. 2) These exceptions are one way, magic can act on the rest of the world but the rest of the world can't act back on magic. The only solution for magic, is more magic. This is where the "Counters Not Included" bit comes in.

Which is something I've been griping about in a few threads lately, especially regarding D&D -- the lack of a more granular, nuanced, mechanism for resisting various sorts of magic.

[Mendicant]

But then you get into things charm and mind control, where there's no partial effect, a limited space for variable resistance, and other problems.

There's no reason why you can't have partial effects here. Charmed is already an intermediary step towards dominated, and going straight to dominated is functionally equivalent to a save-or-die anyway. You could make another effect like "intrigued" or something if you want a halfway point to charmed, but I think it's a design mistake to make parallel health bars that don't talk to each other, and even if they do communicate they won't have the elegance or flexibility of a status tag/hp track combo.

[Bohandas]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

The problem isn;t that the ground state of the world's pgysics is semi-realistic. The problem is that the martial classes are both semi-realistic and also pseudo-medieval. And it's that last bit that really hamstrings them, with better equipment they'd be much more evenly matched. A long range spell doesn't get up to the effective range of a kalashnikov until caster level 19, and you're pretty much limited to 8 spells per round max if you mix twin spell, quicken spell, and split ray, as opposed to 60 bullets per round out of an AK-47

On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.

This actually leaves a lot of room for the supernatural. It is supernatural, maybe even moreso than a wizard. The fireball spell can be done in real life with napalm or white phosphorus, but this can;t be done. Not at all

As noted above, there are players who want their Fighter, or whatever, to be that Guy at the Gym, to be "the fighting man" -- to be utterly and specifically not fantastic at all, and yet to be able to accomplish what would otherwise be impossible, all while the setting shows no signs of "normal human beings for this setting" being anything other than identical to real-world normal human beings.

Point of order. In D&D 3.5e regular professionals and craftsmen who are actually particularly good at what they do will all also fight abnormally well since they must necessarily be above level one in order to put more than 4 points in the relevant skills

[Max_Killjoy]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

Don't conflate anything D&D (the system, any version) has ever done with "sim" or "modelling RL physics".

This actually leaves a lot of room for the supernatural. It is supernatural, maybe even moreso than a wizard. The fireball spell can be done in real life with napalm or white phosphorus, but this can;t be done. Not at all

First... because it's been a point of contention when this topic has come up, to get it out of the way... as far as I'm concerned, for the context of this thread's subject, supernatural == fantastic == magic; "magic" is not constrained or limited to "spellcasting".

Second, choose whatever spells can't be duplicated with zero-safety-regs "stage tricks", and replace fireball.

Third, the point is that those players utterly refuse the idea that their "fighting man^TM" is doing anything supernatural, fantastic, or magic -- utterly, totally reject it.

Point of order. In D&D 3.5e regular professionals and craftsmen who are actually particularly good at what they do will all also fight abnormally well since they must necessarily be above level one in order to put more than 4 points in the relevant skills

That's a separate issue with various editions just being a total failure in one way or another when it comes to "mapping" non-adventuring but competent characters.

[Friv]

On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.

Which is fine, if either:

A) they dial down the power level on magic to match.
B) they accept that those characters will be outmatched by users of magic sometimes.

What they cannot have is everything at once. Cake, or eat it, chose one.

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Like, it's not your personal taste, that's fine, but it really isn't the absolute impossibility that you are treating it as, a fact that I can verify from my own table games.

[Max_Killjoy]

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Like, it's not your personal taste, that's fine, but it really isn't the absolute impossibility that you are treating it as, a fact that I can verify from my own table games.

First, you're conflating different works and the assertions they make. Batman is not Holmes is not some wuxia character, and their "settings" do not overlap.

Second, you're conflating edge-case individuals and "I can see reality from here" characters... with claims about "training" that go orders of magnitude beyond human capacity. A few of the more outlandish Wuxia moves get into the territory needed to "keep up with" spellcasters at high levels in D&D.

Third, this isn't about disbelief, this is about inherently conflicting, mutually exclusive assertions.

[Mechalich]

But the limits of the versatility of being a muggle are much greater than those of "swordsmanship". Surely game designers could have done a much better job creating muggles who could affect the plot much more effectively than someone like the 3e Fighter or Cyclops does.

Well, yes, but characters usually get one or at most two powers when it comes to game design. People complain about the overall weakness of fighters more than that of rogues because the rogues power suite of 'sneaky stuff' and 'general skullduggery' is much more versatile and generally applicable than the fighter's 'hurting things' power suite (and while the rogue can be replaced by spells or minions, it's more difficult to do so).

Overall, it's a general game design challenge to get power balance correct, especially in a game where play style might shift radically and where GMs commonly make major adjustments to rules that they find inconvenient. For example, in VtM spending a lot of points to make your vampire a murder machine who could win a duel with Blade is possible, but stupid. It costs a tiny fraction of the same point investment to buy a bunch of backgrounds that say 'I own the local SWAT team' and call them up whenever you need to bring the pain. However, this only holds true so long as a GM allows you reasonable access to your minions, if the GM structures the game so you absolutely, positively need to be able to fight your way through obstacles using just the core party, that drastically changes how valuable certain powers are.

Getting this right is really hard, and it becomes harder the more power you allow to accrue to your most powerful options. The obvious D&D example is spells like Miracle and Wish which by their very nature laugh at game balance.

I'm glad that there is some people out there that see it that way. This power games seems to be mostly a European (/North America) thing, rooted in that fantasy tradition. East Asia has many powerful (if slightly mystic) martial artists. I've read some Hindu myths where are archer threatens the ocean with a bow and arrow. It may have been magic? They blur the line a lot. Like if you are the spirit of wind, is causing a storm a martial thing or a caster thing. I suppose that is another way to solve the issue, everyone is both.

Wuxia is just superheroes set in a historical setting when you get down to brass tacks. Western fantasy tends to set its superheroes in the modern world, though it doesn't have to. Various interpretations of Arthurian legend (including, to me understanding, the most recent Guy Ritchie movie) have been quite happy to embrace this approach, among others, and plenty of fantasy settings with high magic and low verisimilitude are more or less this as well - Stormlight Archive Radiants are straight up superheroes just as much as any Wuxia martial master might be.

The problem arises when people want to have their fantasy that isn't a superhero game and where most of the characters are operating on the medieval street level rather than the legendary level. The Western fantasy literary tradition, with Howard and Tolkien and Lieber and Vance that inspired D&D operated on this level, and while those worlds have powerful spellcasters, they are almost universally NPCs. The base incompatibility at the heart of the system is that high-level casters aren't operating on the same scale as everybody else and never should have been playable in the first place. When D&D was initially conceived Gygax constructed the system such that a character actually living to become a high-level caster was nigh impossible and later authors also added fluff about high-level casters abandoning their homeworlds to go gallivanting about in other dimensions like Dr. Strange does all the time and thereby removing them from the board. This worked for a while, it didn't really become a problem until 3e provided full casters with a series of massive synergistic power-ups while claiming the playstyle could remain unchanged.

[Quertus]

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Doesn't help those who *are* insisting on completely mundane muggles, though.

But, yes, I think that "mundane muggles" can do a lot more than they're given credit for.

Third, this isn't about disbelief, this is about inherently conflicting, mutually exclusive assertions.

Wanting to be perfectly mundane, and wanting to keep up with high-level spellcasters is tough, I'll admit. But is it impossible?

Couldn't we make a "Muggle" (class, if 3e) that gets numerous SoS/SoD (or even NSJS) on-hit rider effects, "quick hands" reaction abilities / extra actions, "bardic knowledge"+ style knowledge of ways to do stuff (like where planar gates are located, completely mundane words that certain magical creatures will hear & respond to, etc), CPR to resurrect fallen allies, exercises / stretches to remove stat damage, therapy to remove sanity loss, evasion that extends to your mount (which gets massive bonuses because you know how to take care of it, let alone how to ride it), diplomacy, Willow level combat bluff, "action hero" ignoring wounds / "self-healing", etc? At what level (of ability, or actual 3e level) would a Wizard still care about having another Wizard, but no longer care about having a good Muggle?

[Mechalich]

Wanting to be perfectly mundane, and wanting to keep up with high-level spellcasters is tough, I'll admit. But is it impossible?

Couldn't we make a "Muggle" (class, if 3e) that gets numerous SoS/SoD (or even NSJS) on-hit rider effects, "quick hands" reaction abilities / extra actions, "bardic knowledge"+ style knowledge of ways to do stuff (like where planar gates are located, completely mundane words that certain magical creatures will hear & respond to, etc), CPR to resurrect fallen allies, exercises / stretches to remove stat damage, therapy to remove sanity loss, evasion that extends to your mount (which gets massive bonuses because you know how to take care of it, let alone how to ride it), diplomacy, Willow level combat bluff, "action hero" ignoring wounds / "self-healing", etc? At what level (of ability, or actual 3e level) would a Wizard still care about having another Wizard, but no longer care about having a good Muggle?

Very few people would interpret that pile of abilities as anything even resembling mundane.

When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers. Conan gets brought up a lot because he technically qualifies. His stats are unrealistically high for anything you could probably buy in an actual game system, but other than that he doesn't have any specifically supernatural abilities. Also, and very importantly, Conan could, in a reasonable reading of his combat capabilities, probably fight ten decently trained fighters and win, maybe even engage in a running battle with twenty bandits and escape alive. But he couldn't walk into a fortress and ruthlessly slaughter hundreds while remaining completely unharmed, and that's one of the key verisimilitude-based points that people have internalized when they think about fantasy worlds. The most potent 'mundane' character is still someone who interacts with the world, even if they do so in a stylized 'Bond, James Bond' sort of way. By contrast even a modestly powerful magical character can hover atop the world and make decisions that impact billions without even being so much as noticed.

This is actually where mechanics can come into play. High-level mundane characters tend to get mechanical advantages that allow them to overcome effects, while magical characters get those that simply ignore them. A high-level rogue might be able to find and disarm every trap ever invented with trivial ease, but they still have to interact with the traps in the first place. A high-level wizard can just turn incorporeal and glide past everything. This is a mechanical problem that could be changed so that everyone interacts with various types of challenges in more or less the same way. To my understanding 4e D&D actually did this, to some degree anyway. Unfortunately the implementation meant that every character felt exactly the same in the process.

[Arbane]

Which is something I've been griping about in a few threads lately, especially regarding D&D -- the lack of a more granular, nuanced, mechanism for resisting various sorts of magic.

Here's a nice, simple one: Fighters are Realistic. Magic isn't Realistic, so magic doesn't work on Fighters if they don't want it to.

Third, the point is that those players utterly refuse the idea that their "fighting man^TM" is doing anything supernatural, fantastic, or magic -- utterly, totally reject it.

Oh, so that's how to do a ^TM! Thanks!
There's a legitimate place for magicless heroes, but that place is not higher-level D&D.

(I keep reposting this quote, because I think he doesn a good job of explaining the problem. Max, your icon is appropriate to it...)

It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

Where this gets problematic is when it bumps right next to their next demand, that the party is hitting 5th level and they still want to be limited to a benchmark that is essentially 4th level. And while at that point you can in fact keep things kind of hobbling along with the same character with bigger numbers, after a few levels of that it becomes untenable. When the player is asking for their character to be archetypically identical to a 4th level concept and asking to be mechanically balanced with 9th level casters, you're up **** Creek.

That was the horrible revelation that was caused by the Tome Fighter. The harsh reality is that Mad Martigan is a 4th level character and the people who hold up Mad Martigan as the example are seriously not saying that they want higher level abilities that happen to be skinned as guts and luck, they are literally saying that they want to be quintessentially 4th level characters while being balanced with 9th level characters. It's an actually and actively contradictory thought pattern and there is no solution.

Contrariwise, the Tome Monk get accepted with hardly a blip. Some people quibble about it being overpowered. Some people even helpfully informed us that it was more powerful than a Core Monk. But people didn't tell us that any of it was out of theme. Because the Monk theme is one which can in fact continue growing until it's Goku. Similarly, "Wizard" is a character concept that just keeps growing forever. Your summoner summons electric rat, and then he summons a storm crow, and then he's summoning a thunder dragon. No one bats an eye at this ****.

But Fighter players seriously do get annoyed and even offended when their character can beat up an elephant with their bare hands. Also they get annoyed and offended when they notice that the other characters are more powerful than they are. It really is cognitive dissonance, and the solution is to force people to abandon the Fighter concept after a few levels.

When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers. Conan gets brought up a lot because he technically qualifies. His stats are unrealistically high for anything you could probably buy in an actual game system, but other than that he doesn't have any specifically supernatural abilities.

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

There's plenty of games you could make someone at Conan-level badassery, it's just that the other PCs made on the same number of points should be just as powerful/omnicompetent.

(I think Conan is officially a superhero now, as he's joining a team of Avengers in the comics. the mind boggles...)

[Mechalich]

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

I've seen that write-up. The part about it I find interesting in the context of this sort of discussion is that Gygax's representation of Conan implies that he thought Conan was OP. And Conan isn't OP by any means. His most extreme achievement in Howard's stories might reasonably be noted as that time he killed a 'dragon' (which was just a big lizard, probably about as dangerous as an Allosaurus) using a combination of martial skill and trickery. In 3.5e D&D, Conan is maybe a 7/3 Barbarian/Rogue with really high stats in a few areas.

To interpret Frank's quote though, I agree he's right that certain concepts, and 'guy with no supernatural powers' is one of them, have a hard ceiling in terms of how far they scale. The thing is, I also think a huge number of players want to hold their adventures in a world where 'guy with no supernatural powers' remains relevant throughout the entire scope of PC power scaling, or at least a world that pretends this is true. And that's because I believe people want their characters to interact with the fantasy world rather than play fantasy supers where only the supers matter, which is the reality of superhero universes.

If this is true, and it's certainly true some of the time, including in most D&D fiction, then the trick is to find a way to impose a hard ceiling on the casters that is at least in roughly the same place as the martials (you can give the martials better utilization of magical equipment to make things fuzzier) that still allows them to throw around satisfying levels of magic. One way to do this is by limiting overall magical power, like how PF half-casters only get up to 6th level spells and have a reduced spell level progression. Another is introducing specific vulnerabilities, like making spells take longer to cast in order to render them functionally useless in combat. There are plenty of other ways to do it, though only certain methods will work for certain playstyles (which makes this particularly challenging for games like D&D).

[FaerieGodfather]

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

Same phenomenon, closer to home: look at the 3.X statblock of any FR novel character in the FRCS. It's not just Drizzt and Elminster.

(I think Conan is officially a superhero now, as he's joining a team of Avengers in the comics. the mind boggles...)

god damn it, I have been working on this fanfic for ten years now.

[Morty]

D&D magic needs to be burnt to the ground and started from scratch. There's nothing particularly worthwhile or salvageable about it. The problem is that, sadly, it has seeped deep into the fantasy gaming genre and coloured people's expectations of what magic "should" be able to do. Not always or maybe even not most of the time, particularly when a system or story consciously tries to defy it. But often enough.

Trying to get non-magical skills to match it is a losing game, because you're trying to accomplish something that shouldn't be accomplished. Besides, using Conan as an example goes to show that D&D non-casters can't even really match up to the archetypal barbarian hero who pushes the limits of what's humanly possible. But it's not as if he lifts buildings bare-handed or anything.

It needs to remembered, though, that the supremacy of magic in D&D exists on purpose. Mages/wizards are the ultimate nerd superheroes who win through the power of being smart and prepared. Later on clerics and druids got to join them as honorary nerd superheroes. Of course, there's plenty of other systems where magic, or whatever else we call it, is superior. Those games are just more honest about it.

[Quertus]

Very few people would interpret that pile of abilities as anything even resembling mundane.

When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers.

So, what in my list do you consider a "mystic power"?

• Jabbing someone in the eye / pressure points / etc to impose blind / stunned / various other status effects?
• The ability to react to someone else's action, rather than wait for a span of 6 seconds?
• Knowing things? (OK, that one had a typo (darn autocorrect), and was supposed to read "know stuff", not "do stuff" or I just worded it oddly…)
• CPR?
• Massaging sore joints to remove related penalties?
• Therapy alla CoC?
• Evasion? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…
• Extending evasion to your mount?
• Diplomacy? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there, the way most people ignorant of (or just ignoring) how it was handled in 2e interpret it…
• Convincing people of the impossible? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…
• Turning "convincing people of the impossible" into a weapon?
• HP?
• Action surge healing? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…

So, I don't know about you, but the only ones I reacted to were things "mundanes" could already do in D&D. My additions were, IMO, *more mundane* than D&D supposed "muggles".

By contrast even a modestly powerful magical character can hover atop the world and make decisions that impact billions without even being so much as noticed.

So high-level muggles need an explicit power "voice of the kingdom", that lets them impact policy decisions on a local / global / planar scale, simply by declaring that they are for or against something?

This is actually where mechanics can come into play. High-level mundane characters tend to get mechanical advantages that allow them to overcome effects, while magical characters get those that simply ignore them. A high-level rogue might be able to find and disarm every trap ever invented with trivial ease, but they still have to interact with the traps in the first place. A high-level wizard can just turn incorporeal and glide past everything. This is a mechanical problem that could be changed so that everyone interacts with various types of challenges in more or less the same way. To my understanding 4e D&D actually did this, to some degree anyway. Unfortunately the implementation meant that every character felt exactly the same in the process.

Yuck, no. Knock does not give you a +20 bonus to open locks. That's what skill-boosting spells are for.

OK, fine. Invisibility gives you a +20 circumstance bonus to Hide (and hard no-sells LoS or being seen). I suppose you could spend the ink to explicitly call out exactly how every spell interacts with the skill system, but what would that look like? Knock is a hard no-sell on a door being locked, and gives you a +20 circumstance bonus on figuring out how to turn the knob, or how to lock it again? getting a surprise round / stealth checks involving that door? Disabling it permanently? I've got nothing here.

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, so that's how to do a ^TM! Thanks!
There's a legitimate place for magicless heroes, but that place is not higher-level D&D.

(I keep reposting this quote, because I think he doesn a good job of explaining the problem. Max, your icon is appropriate to it...)

Frank Trollman[/B]]
It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

Where this gets problematic is when it bumps right next to their next demand, that the party is hitting 5th level and they still want to be limited to a benchmark that is essentially 4th level. And while at that point you can in fact keep things kind of hobbling along with the same character with bigger numbers, after a few levels of that it becomes untenable. When the player is asking for their character to be archetypically identical to a 4th level concept and asking to be mechanically balanced with 9th level casters, you're up **** Creek.

That was the horrible revelation that was caused by the Tome Fighter. The harsh reality is that Mad Martigan is a 4th level character and the people who hold up Mad Martigan as the example are seriously not saying that they want higher level abilities that happen to be skinned as guts and luck, they are literally saying that they want to be quintessentially 4th level characters while being balanced with 9th level characters. It's an actually and actively contradictory thought pattern and there is no solution.

Contrariwise, the Tome Monk get accepted with hardly a blip. Some people quibble about it being overpowered. Some people even helpfully informed us that it was more powerful than a Core Monk. But people didn't tell us that any of it was out of theme. Because the Monk theme is one which can in fact continue growing until it's Goku. Similarly, "Wizard" is a character concept that just keeps growing forever. Your summoner summons electric rat, and then he summons a storm crow, and then he's summoning a thunder dragon. No one bats an eye at this ****.

But Fighter players seriously do get annoyed and even offended when their character can beat up an elephant with their bare hands. Also they get annoyed and offended when they notice that the other characters are more powerful than they are. It really is cognitive dissonance, and the solution is to force people to abandon the Fighter concept after a few levels.

That's largely the same issue I've been trying to articulate since the first thread on this subject I posted in not that long after joining these forums.

They want a game in which their Fighting Man^TM is at heart a normal person, nothing about him supernatural/fantastic/magical, is at the end of the day still a Normal Person (if at the far fictional edge of multiple capabilities); where that Normal Person can fight the highest of high magic and win, and where the Normal Person looks like and seems like and has the range of abilities of a Normal Person as we in our world would recognize, such that the setting is recognizable to them as "the real world as it could have been" rather than an utterly fantastic setting.

SOMETHING has to give in that list.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yuck, no. Knock does not give you a +20 bonus to open locks. That's what skill-boosting spells are for.

OK, fine. Invisibility gives you a +20 circumstance bonus to Hide (and hard no-sells LoS or being seen). I suppose you could spend the ink to explicitly call out exactly how every spell interacts with the skill system, but what would that look like? Knock is a hard no-sell on a door being locked, and gives you a +20 circumstance bonus on figuring out how to turn the knob, or how to lock it again? getting a surprise round / stealth checks involving that door? Disabling it permanently? I've got nothing here.

Invisibility (shoud) let you hide even in plain sight and disables sight-based things and gives you a bonus to attacking someone (because they can't see you). It shouldn't help you be quiet, which is part of being hidden (ie not detected). So no bonus to skills, just enables something you can't normally do (be hidden without cover).

Spells should not replace skills except where the spells are one or more of
a) way more expensive in real terms (either an expensive, non-replaceable component or a high level spell slot)
b) slower (if it takes 10 minutes to cast knock), if time is important
c) inconvenient (if a casting of knock only opens a single lock, for example, or makes lots of noise).

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. Enhance the capabilities, don't replace. So cast invisibility on the stealthy guy so he doesn't even need to keep to the shadows. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly. Cast grant aptitude (a spell I made up) to temporarily give someone the ability to pick locks like a rogue with maxed skill points in that. Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.

[Max_Killjoy]

Invisibility (shoud) let you hide even in plain sight and disables sight-based things and gives you a bonus to attacking someone (because they can't see you). It shouldn't help you be quiet, which is part of being hidden (ie not detected). So no bonus to skills, just enables something you can't normally do (be hidden without cover).

Spells should not replace skills except where the spells are one or more of
a) way more expensive in real terms (either an expensive, non-replaceable component or a high level spell slot)
b) slower (if it takes 10 minutes to cast knock), if time is important
c) inconvenient (if a casting of knock only opens a single lock, for example, or makes lots of noise).

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. Enhance the capabilities, don't replace. So cast invisibility on the stealthy guy so he doesn't even need to keep to the shadows. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly. Cast grant aptitude (a spell I made up) to temporarily give someone the ability to pick locks like a rogue with maxed skill points in that. Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.

That's my focus for magic in the RPG setting I'm working on -- most spells should be enhancements, not replacements or negations.

So a spell that creates "phantom tools" to let a thief pick a lock without tools, or a spell that temporarily gives a boost to the skill (such that the unskilled become competent and the competent become masters), is fine... but a spell that just negates locks (and thus the character investment in dealing with locks; along with implying the setting dissonance of why anyone uses mundane locks) immediately hits the trash bin.

[Quertus]

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly.

Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.

So, these seem the most important bits.

"Invisibility on the Rogue" is (and should remain) the optimal play. Agreed. If you want max stealth, start with the best chassis.

However.

Your group is, as a group, only as stealthy as the least-stealthy member. Invisibility is, at times, handy to throw on the tin can - or, yes, even on the Wizard himself - to keep the Rogue from saving his own neck / letting you all die rather than dieing with you, and going back to the tavern to find a more acceptable party (or, if what killed you didn't care about loot, just retiring after selling your stuff).

-----

Whether "Knock" should exist is an interesting design decision. Personally, I like abilities which communicate "we're too big for this baby stuff", much like SAO Kirito just letting bandits hit him, or Teleport largely negating travel, or teeth negating the need for food to be pre-mushed, or eyes largely negating the need to feel about blindly. I like games that have clearly delineated mechanical growth, as it provides impetus for the game as a whole to grow. But that's a matter of taste.