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Thread: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
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2019-04-24, 02:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
AD&D doesn't even pretend to keep them on par. At low levels, casters suck. By design. They're totally, intentionally the carry. At high levels, casters rule. By design. So AD&D is a bad example of one where "mundane" people keep up with casters at all levels. It was the place where "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" started, for goodness sake.
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2019-04-24, 02:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Fighters were at their peak performance in 2nd edition, sporting crazy potential like 5 attacks per round that don't get worse successively with a Thaco that guaranteed you're only missing on a 1. With a few wizard buffs they get disgusting fast. The linear aspect is true as they require casters for the multiplication effects. But that's all editions, Fighters get much better when buffed while Wizards see meager improvements comparatively. But what truly made casters "quadratic" back then was how broken their spells were. Polymorph Any Object, Gate, Prismatic Sphere, Stoneskin, Wall of Force, Haste doubling all your attacks, Fireball (in that HP environment), saveless Power Word Kill in a low hp environment, all divination and messaging, Permanency, etc. There was hardly anything they couldn't do because the spells had few to no limitations. The imagination was all you were capped by for some spells while others were just ludicrously strong. They had the same sorts of spells as we do now yet through the editions the most broken of them have been severely nerfed and limitations added.
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2019-04-24, 02:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Let's compare.
AD&D Fighters: Great at dealing direct damage and surviving. Yay!
AD&D Wizards: Can do anything they can imagine. Yay!
To me, those don't even seem to be in the same ballpark. You still have the "fighters can't do anything out of combat" problem and the "wizards can do anything" problems.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2019-04-24, 02:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Anyone know of a system where "Fighters" are good in combat and bad everywhere else, and "Wizards" are bad in combat and good everywhere else?
Rifts is one that I'm familiar with, but I'd like to hear of others.
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2019-04-24, 02:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Precisly, I agree. It was less of a wizard issue though and more of a "certain spells need to be banned" issue. Most of the high level magics were fairly ordinary and merely powerful. Something your hasted fighter swinging 10 times per round for 25 dmg against the 200 health boss can relate to. The DMG even suggested not allowing every spell to be accessible and without a scroll the wizard couldn't learn it. So part of me feels this was intentional as they incorporated various overpowered spells mingled among the normal ones. Truly spectacular spells for the more heroic campaigns existed in the books alongside some of the worst uses for a spell lot ever conceived.
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2019-04-24, 03:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Last edited by Arbane; 2019-04-24 at 03:08 PM.
Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
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2019-04-24, 03:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Why doesn't Conan have magic? Heck, with all the programmers around IRL, why can't everyone program their VCR, or write a basic phone app?
Wow. Usually, the problem is only that people want to run Conan alongside Elminster, or Joe Average alongside Superman. There's a time and place for such characters, but it's usually not alongside characters who completely outclass them - almost certainly not if you care about balance.
But what you just said? That's a completely different problem. That's not The Shoveler claiming to be a superhero, that's The Shoveler claiming to be the pinnacle of superheroes.
If a kid with a rusty knife can one-shot mechs with any regularity, you're not playing Battletech any more. There is a limit to how much you can warp things and still claim to be playing the same game. Even e6 still (incongruously IMO) leaves the "omnipresent over the top super-powers" like gods around.
Well, yes. The mundane super power "buy stuff" (like potions of water breathing) can (in some systems) give even Muggles this "with time, I can do anything" capability. At which point, with enough time, money, and intelligence (pun intended), anyone can do anything.
Bug? Or feature? I'm not sure, tbh. But I feel confident saying, "can do nothing, ever" is a) almost always a bug; b) not entirely unlike how martials feel to those who complain about M/C issues.
Personally, I don't particularly enjoy the "buy gear / swap spells" minigames. I'd just as soon have everyone be at 100%, all the time.
Lost context. I'll check on this in a bit
What's the difference? If the plot requires us to get to another plane, but they're no way there, isn't that a world-building / scenario-building issue?
OTOH, if this is a sandbox… I suppose i could leverage knowledge of the world having *no* portals to other planes to some advantage - especially if this were D&D, where that would be bizarre.
Oh. When people talk about what an "all Muggle" party can't do, "travel to other planes" is usually in that list. I contend that they can… you just have to wait for it… wait for it… just like the plug & play Wizards.
Wow. That is a cool new way of expressing one of the problems. I don't know that I've ever thought in terms of spotlight quality/importance balance issues before.
It's only the case for *optimally* played Wizards - kinda the "anti Quertus", anti "player's first Wizard" scenario - so not every table - but I can definitely see it as an argument for making resource distribution even (alla my "make all Wizard spells usable at will" mantra).
No, but it is the classic example, and one of the most productive to discuss.
You have a most interesting PoV. Suffice it to say, everyone my senile mind remembers talking to about this topic seemed happy giving everyone access to rituals, but only Wizards get Quick Magic. It would be like saying everyone can sacrifice to & pray to the gods for miracles, but only Priests can pull off guaranteed effects *right now*.
I can see doing things your way, but understand that, IME, it's not the prevalent perception.
Also, the Wizard I like to run? He would do everything with magic. He world user magic to comb his hair, magic to change his clothes. Or maybe that's not hair - that's actually orichalcum wires growing out of his skull. Maybe that's not clothes, that's actually solidified dreams. The Wizard I *want* to run? There would be nothing *mundane* about him.Last edited by Quertus; 2019-04-24 at 03:44 PM.
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2019-04-24, 03:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
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2019-04-24, 03:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
In my experiance AD&D disproves all of the points you raised in the quoted post, and has never broken my versimilitude as long as I accept that certain things (like HP) are gamist abstractions.
In combat high level fighters get 3 plus attacks per round that are likely to hit on anything but a one, and make all of their saving throws on anything but a one. The wizard is likely to go last and automatically loses their spell if they are hit (not damaged) by an attack.
Out of combat, wizards simply don't have the infinite spells to change the world that they do in 3.X. All of the things that break the economy or the nature of space time wide open were added in 3.X.
The, ideal party is a balanced one. Its like fighting a war against one enemy who has a lot of bombs but nothing to drop them, one enemy who has a lot of planes but nothing to drop out of the , and one guy who has a mix of bombs and planes.
Also, as for your last point, fighters in every edition of D&D have magic items. Nobody ever objected to it, and it didn't fix 3.X balance, so the whole idea that people reject a fighter with any magic whatsoever or that giving a figter "super powers" will fix the 3.X CMD is pretty much nonsense imo.Looking for feedback on Heart of Darkness, a character driven RPG of Gothic fantasy.
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2019-04-24, 03:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-04-24, 03:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
You might want to check out:
Earthdawn: An attempt at making a D&D-ish setting make sense. All PC classes, even the fighty-types, are explicitly using magic to boost their abilities.
RuneQuest: All player-characters are expected to start knowing a few minor spells. But if you want someone dead, stabbing them repeatedly with a spear is much more efficient.Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
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2019-04-24, 04:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
I really hope there are more examples. It'd be really quite sad if there aren't.
"Fighters" being bad outside of combat is often assumed with a lot of TTRPG systems, yet the idea of a "Wizard" being worse in combat than "Fighters" is apparently very rare. It makes sense, considering that's the reason for this whole thread, but a bit sad that many game developers haven't recognized the bad trend.
Or maybe game developers don't consider anything that's not combat to be relevant. 4e did that, and the disparity between Fighter types and Wizard Types were actually extremely low.
Maybe that's the solution: If you care about balance, make the game only about combat; otherwise, don't.
[Edit] I guess the Warhammer 40k TTRPG is kinda like this, where Spess Mahreens were deathbots and everyone else were cannon fodder with backstories.Last edited by Man_Over_Game; 2019-04-24 at 06:06 PM.
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2019-04-24, 04:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
I feel like you're reading half of each of my posts. You seem to think I'm trying to make an argument or an attack, when I'm presenting (yet again, on this topic) an analysis of how a certain subset of players want a set of things from their system and setting combo that are, when taken together, inherently conflicting.
If you're talking about four-item list, AD&D can't "disprove them" or "satisfy them all", they're not claims or talking points -- it's the list of mutually exclusive "solutions" to the inherent dilemma and contradictions introduced by trying to have non-fantastic utterly-"mandane" Fighter in the same game as the sorts of spellcasters epitomized, but not limited to, 3.x.
First, I don't have time to go dig my AD&D books out of storage and go through how easy it was for a wizard to avoid the problems of going last or being hit, even as far back as that edition.
Second, we're not even talking about totally breaking the economy or the nature of speacetime. A spell as simple as Knock is as much on-point here as Wish (and Wish was around in AD&D...).
Yeah, that last guy... that's the D&D spellcaster. Especially in, but not limited to, 3.x
Where did I say anything about fighters not having magic weapons or armor? In fact, I even said at one point "maybe they have magic weapons or armor or whatever..." as part of the description of the sort of character the "just steel and grit" players want to play.
Sorry you've missed the posters who are adamant that their Fighter be utterly devoid of fantastic abilities, but they've repeatedly posted to threads on this topic before. If you really want to take that last half-step and just openly call me a liar about that, I guess I can waste the time to go back and find those posts this weekend or whenever I can fit it in. I wonder if the max post size here can handle all the links I'll come up with... (And at this point, yeah, I do feel like I'm being called a liar, because I've said "no, really, it's there, I've seen it repeatedly", and just getting "no you haven't" in response.)
As for the CMD specific to 3.x... it's a situation where the spellcasters do have superpowers (in a broad sense), and that leaves the list of choices I laid out previously -- and it's an all-encompassing list. Every option falls into one of the listed possibles.
The point of all this isn't to promote a single solution to the contradiction, it's only to demonstrate that there is an inherent contradiction and lay out the possible resolutions, each of which involves giving something up. Individual gamers will have to choose which thing they give up. The one thing that cannot be had here is everything at the same time.Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2019-04-24 at 05:01 PM.
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2019-04-24, 06:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Another example is the Warhammer-based board game HeroQuest, which I'm sure is going to spark nostalgia among many of you. The fighter-type Barbarian was your combat powerhouse and utterly terrible at doing anything other than slaughtering half the dungeon solo. Three skull dice was too strong and he could upgrade to five dice easily. Meanwhile, the Wizard only rolled one dice for combat and had extremely limited spells that couldn't be spammed. Once it was gone, it was gone for the rest of the dungeon and they could only bring nine of them. They were useful buffers, combat enhancers, and tactical enablers but only a bare few spells caused any damage and the fighter could easily trump it in a single turn with a little luck. Those spells were best reserved for boss enemies with high defense dice.
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2019-04-24, 07:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Max, I am not trying to fight with you or call you a liar. I do think that most people on both sides in this thread (and the previous 500 incarnations of it), including you, are to some degree doing some version of what happens in an internet echo chamber and ascribing all opposing view points to every member of the opposing side, which is more or less what I am arguing against. The "guy at the gym fallacy" and the "caster martial disparity bingo," both give the impression that it is a black and white dichotomy where people either want mundane suck-ass martials or anime super heroes, with no in between, or that there are is no way to balance a D&D mage against a D&D martial.
In my experience with AD&D (and many other fantasy adventure RPGs) over many decades I have never seen this actually play out anywhere except 3.X.
When you state that "One of these four points MUST be true," I was simply countering that in my experience none of those four points are true in AD&D (or most other D&D-like RPGs I have played).
Likewise, you stated that Conan has nothing except a maybe a sword, determination, and mighty thews, and I was responding that in D&D Conan would have a whole host of other attributes and abilities, not the least of which is an arsenal of magic items.
In my example about planes and bombs, do note that I am talking about parties, not individuals. A party of four wizards (or four fighters for that matter) would likely get their teeth knocked in by a more balanced party, and in actual play would die horribly unless they were very high level and either just so happened to have just the right spells prepared for every dungeon and / or had no pressure on them to stop them from going back to town and resting up and researching new spells constantly, in which case a balanced party would almost certainly be more efficient for clearing dungeons.
My main point is not the power or versatility of the spells themselves that are the problems, rather how convenient they are. For example, 2E wish always ages you five years, takes an hour and a half to memorize, requires a level 9 spell slot (you get 1 at 18 or 19, 2 at level 20, no bonuses), requires 2d4 days of bedrest after casting, and has a built in clause about the DM twisting any wishes they find to be abusive.
Compare this to the 3.X shapechanging into a zodar and getting unlimited XP free wishes which includes the ability to conjure any magic item you can imagine without DM interference.Looking for feedback on Heart of Darkness, a character driven RPG of Gothic fantasy.
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2019-04-24, 07:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
It's not even that fighters, or even any PCs at all, should be devoid of fantastic abilities, it's that, if you want to have 'the masses' be devoid of fantastic abilities then you need to acknowledge that in your design.
For example, in Vampire: the Masquerade it is a critical point of the game that the masses both have no fantastical abilities whatsoever and yet were still powerful enough to overwhelm all vampires through sheer weight of numbers as far back at the 15th century or so which is why the Masquerade came into being and the game is able to exist at all. Once you establish this point you can't have all-powerful elder vampires who are completely untouchable to the masses even in millions vs. one scenarios or the setting breaks down (of course, because it was a White-wolf game they did exactly that).
In a setting with spellcasters as powerful as those present in D&D the masses are quickly rendered utterly irrelevant and the result is that if the world manages to avoid one of several potential mystical apocalypses it eventually stabilizes around competing polities ruled by immortal god-king spellcasters - that is, it becomes Dark Sun (though it need not be that dark, there's not reason why you shouldn't have good and neutral mystic overlords in addition to evil ones).
Now you can certainly build such a world, it's just that the stories you tell in it have two tiers. You have the god-king tier where the sorcerers and their chosen servants engage in various machinations in which the fate of the world (or at least sizeable regions) is at stake, and you have the masses tier where various creative people creep around and have adventures in the shadow of much more powerful beings who either actively control the state of the world or just can't be bothered and sit back and mess with everyone according to their whims (Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, after all, spend a very large percentage of their respective stories as the b****** of Sheelba and Ningauble). And this is the same sort of power dynamic that happens in a modern superhero world if you remove the guardrails of comic book logic that prevents the heroes and villains from chopping the world up into little fiefdoms (minus a few exceptions like Dr. Doom).
But a lot of people don't want to game in those worlds. They don't want a mid-level party to be able to march into a mid-sized two-thousand person town and effortlessly slaughter everyone, because it breaks the setting and, frankly, is really kind of stupid (just like those Civil war battles in Skyrim where you relentlessly murder dozens of guards in endless waves without the slightest trouble). And i think what happens is that many people - guided by the literature - hit on the idea that one point of balance here is that the warrior types don't have any supernatural abilities, and so even peak conditioning, expert training, and some magical gear have their limits and yield characters who can beat ten men but not one hundred. Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.
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2019-04-24, 07:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Exactly.
But that's why "a setting where most people largely have the same limits as real-world people" and "any notion of a coherent setting at all" are two of the things I list that can be given up.
If the player wants their "within non-fantastical/non-magical limits" character to be able to challenge what are effectively superhuman spellcasters, then either the setting can change to enable those characters -- and by extension countless NPCs across the setting -- to do things that WE, in OUR WORLD would consider fantastic, but that are utterly normal in the fictional world; or they can just discard any notion of a setting that makes any sense or holds up at all.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
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2019-04-24, 07:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
There are at least two general categories of ways to balance the two, as listed -- dial down spellcasters, or dial up martials.
There's no dichotomy being presented here, no black-and-white... the two dials could both be turned to meet somewhere between.
It's not that those players want suck-ass martials -- it's that they want "mundane martials" to be able to keep up with spellcasters in a game where spellcasters quickly escalate to superhuman, AND they want a fairly standard-looking fantasy world with standard-looking masses of standard-seeming people, AND they want to claim it all makes sense.
I'm not arguing for or against "mundane martials" or any other place for martials on a supernatural power scale or scope -- I'm only arguing that "mundane martials" don't work unless the gamer is willing to give up something else.
In some versions of D&D, those other abilities for supposedly non-magical Classes ARE fantastic, they're not spellcasting, but they are "magic" in that they blatantly blow past what are otherwise the peak human limitations in that setting. That is, the issue is solved by "dialing up the martials", even if some don't want to admit that those martials have reached their own superhuman scale by upper levels.
And I did note that perhaps those characters have magic items -- but at least in my experience, it takes a stack of magic items for a pure Fighter to be on par with a Wizard... but then the Wizard gets magic items of his own.
Taking what you are saying about 2e as true for the sake of argument, then the one that applies to 2e is "dial down the spellcasters", at least comparison to 3.x.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
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2019-04-24, 07:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
I do think that it would be POSSIBLE to allow much of this sort of stuff - but you'd have to have major weaknesses to wizards which D&D has never had (though earlier editions had some of them).
1. Have major drawbacks to the biggest spells. Make them take multiple rounds in which the caster is vulnerable etc. Early D&D did some of this - but they often left backdoor methods to plug those holes for the caster.
2. Have high level martials be inherently resistant to magic - which could lead to a RPS scenario between badass martials, casters, and armies. Armies can overwhelm any martial, high level martials can power through spells to take down casters (hopefully a martail & caster are about equal for the same leveled character - but the martials are much more common in lore) while casters can nuke armies. As an example - the martial could gain some sort of magical resistance pool which would have to be beaten through before SoD/SoS spells can do anything - in D&D terms without extra rules, the spells which require the target to be below X HP are a decent way of doing it.
3. Possibly make casters be able to more easily counter each-other, where (for example) a level 6 caster could mostly shut down a level 10 caster for a short time (though would run out of juice) giving his martial allies a chance to stab him while he can't cast. (I always WANTED 3.x's counterspelling system to work - but even after spending major character resources it was always mediocre. About the only way to do it decently was for a bard to counterspell with Dispel Magic after he'd already gotten Inspire Courage and a couple of buffs up - since he'd already done his job and even a 50-60% chance to shut down an equal level wizard was worth it.)Last edited by CharonsHelper; 2019-04-24 at 07:59 PM.
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2019-04-24, 08:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
My answer to martials up or casters down is usually both, or it can be bring the casters down. In one of the previous iterations of this thread someone said it was pointless to give martials near infinite power because casters had infinite power. Ignoring the fact that that would still be progress I realized: Who wants to play/tell a story about an infinitely powerful character? OK people do, but I certainly don't because as it gets harder and harder to tell interesting stories as power-levels get further and further away from real life. As the story gets more distant from reality the difference usually has to be about that difference. And at this point I think I am just babbling.
Maybe I will try to think of another thing to say about base rules. Does anyone else have anything to say about that? I don't mind if we go over the old caster/martial paths again, but I would really like to explore this other view to see if there is anything interesting there.
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2019-04-24, 08:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
1. The issue with this is that those aren't fun. Especially in a combat heavy game like D&D, people will always seek ways to avoid those drawbacks (or sweep them aside). It's great for fiction, but not so much for games. People don't often want to be wizards to only cast spells narratively and cower in combat. At least it's so in my games.
2. That doesn't avoid the "break the world" issues. If only the walking tank can fight the genocidal man, then you've got a superhero situation, which always run on a big dose of suspension of disbelief. They're also not so great for balance, because hard counters kinda stink when you're the one being countered.
3. Still has the "only casters can play" problem. 5e makes counterspelling easier (3rd level spell on a lot of lists counters everything 3rd and below and those above with a decent chance), but cast-counter duels aren't that much fun either.
I think the only way to do it is to both cut casters from their quasi-omnipotence and abandon the "only casters are magic/fantastic" thing some people have and spread the "caster-like" wealth. Or play different games where everyone's toned down (ie Pendragon, where casters are NPCs only) or toned up (Exalted, Godbound). It's the middle-ground that's hard.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2019-04-24, 09:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
I didn't mean that ALL spells would be slow to cast - just the biggest ones. So for your 3rd level slot, do you take the big bad X, or do you take a less powerful fast-cast spell? Also - I don't think that it's that bad to charge up for a turn or three if the turns are fast enough - especially if you're using side-based initiative. (Even if the total turn was the same length - charging up your move with side-based initiative doesn't FEEL as bad, because your buddies are still doing stuff during the turn.)
I didn't mean R-P-S on the individual basis - but on a worldbuilding one. If the setting has 50 wizards that can devastate armies, but several thousand martials who are their equal in combat (who themselves would die to said armies) then the world sorta works, but the group dynamic is fine because 1 martial is only equal to 1 wizard.
Oh - you'd definitely have to make counterspelling more interesting than just saying "I counterspell" *rolls dice*.
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2019-04-25, 12:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Ok, an analogy what is wrong with D&D-style magic and tends to seep into every discussion about this topic:
Magic is like a smartphone and spells are like the apps. Once you have them downloaded and installed, they are instantly ready to use and will perform their function. To "balance" this, only classes with a very weak combat chassis have a smartphone of any kind and you must be this tall to use the app, meaning level gating them. Scrolls, wands and staves are the equivalent to investing in some power banks, to prolong the battery life of your smartphone.
As Satinavian, me and a few others already mentioned, there are game systems/settings that don't treat magic as the simple "Have it? Yes/No." of the smartphone analogy and spells not as the self-powered and ready to run apps. Mostly, they express magic as an external power source, serious practitioners of magic as people who have mastered the techniques to store something of that and spells as an interface to that power that have to be fueled in some way or another to either start their effect or keep it running.
Potentially same power peek, the later even a bit higher because there is no need to level gate, nothing is preventing someone from learning the equivalents of a Gate and Wish spells right from the get-go, but still the reverse situation, because while you're guaranteed the spell, you're not guaranteed to either gain enough power to use them or to have enough power at hand when you need it the most.
Add to that one of the oddities of D&D/PF, automatic growth of HP, saves, BAB and such, without having to invest anything in it. While your 1st level Wizard can be one-shot by a house cat, a 10th level Wizard can beat down a lion with his quarterstaff at no investment involved. That is not the case for most other systems where you have to make active investments into offensive, defensive and general survival abilities, forcing you to make a lot of choices about your priorities.
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2019-04-25, 03:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Hm, ok, two things:
The argument is mostly about the difference between internal and external power sources and by extension, having to rely on the GM. You might know from past conversations that I don't differentiate too much between having the Gate spell, owning a Candle of Invocation, paying a NPC for the service to cast Gate (maybe from a scroll) or simply looking for a permanent gate somewhere. For me, knowing that there are multiple ways to reach the same goal is enough and as a GM, I tend to include anything in a module or scenario that might be needed to succeed, more or less independent of the characters involved (as in, doors without keys are a bit weird, magic traps without deactivation words, too...). For a lot of others, tho, it is absolutely important that they have a secured internal access to such things, as it forms the basis of their whole planning and interaction with the game world.
The other thing is that I question a bit whether you have stayed up to date in regards to how to handle a Wizard. I don't mean the whole theory-talk about what could be possible under an extremely lenient GM and some such, but simply best practices how to build them and manage their resources, especially how to stay flexible and how to use stable multi-functional spells to gain access to support or i-win-buttons on the fly. A rather simple example would be using feats that rapidly speeded up the time it takes to fill a slot on thy fly, or swap out prepped spells or knowing which summons will grant access to certain SLAs/SUs and so on. That's not exactly high-OP stuff, but rather part and parcel of what can be found in the more up to date guides.
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2019-04-25, 06:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Whenever this topic, or others like it come up, it occurs to me that maybe these discussions would greatly benefit from more gamers having broader exposure to a variety of systems... that maybe some gamers just interpret what's being said through the lenses of black-box magic and leveled progression and so on, without the alternatives coming to mind.
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2019-04-25, 06:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
There are some, but none that is actually good enough in other ways to play it.
Usually it works by casting being really time consuming and benefitting from an controlled and serene environment. That makes magic just impractical or even completely useless in tactical combat while still being quite beneficial in preparing the battlefield or for other strategic purposes.
The caster has also the the super power to buy a potion. He doesn't need the ability to make the water breathing spell available to cast on a whim if that is not important enough to waste a "spell known" equivalent or other real costs.
What's the difference? If the plot requires us to get to another plane, but they're no way there, isn't that a world-building / scenario-building issue?
OTOH, if this is a sandbox… I suppose i could leverage knowledge of the world having *no* portals to other planes to some advantage - especially if this were D&D, where that would be bizarre.
For non-D&D, well, of three current fantasy RPG settings i play in which have other planes, two don't have any such portals, only planar travel spells, the third has a set low double digit number of known portals for the whole world. Which are all in the center of cities utilizing this planar travel possibility, only open at certain times and heavily guarded and certainly no obscure knowledge.
You have a most interesting PoV. Suffice it to say, everyone my senile mind remembers talking to about this topic seemed happy giving everyone access to rituals, but only Wizards get Quick Magic. It would be like saying everyone can sacrifice to & pray to the gods for miracles, but only Priests can pull off guaranteed effects *right now*.Last edited by Satinavian; 2019-04-25 at 06:50 AM.
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2019-04-25, 06:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
Black-box magic and leveled progression, albeit not precisely in D&D fashion, are what you get in most video games, whether it's jRPGs, Skyrim, or your average MMO. Regardless of how much of that's due to cross-pollination the idea of fire-and-forget magical effects tied to a resource pool (point based systems are probably more common than spell slots, but D&D doesn't get any less imbalanced when you switch to psionics so that's not really significant) is firmly entrenched at this point. It's also a fairly convenient system to use at a table, is easy to write content for, and has fairly good rules clarity to prevent arguments. 'I use X, it does Y' is a simple and effective formula that unfortunately happens to be particularly vulnerable to balance issues, especially when you start allowing multiple output variables to interact.
By contrast, systems where you build character powers by adding up points like in GURPS or by formulating effects on the fly like in MtA or Ars Magica have some very clear abuse points and tend to lead to a great many arguments with the GM if people at the table aren't willing to be accommodating. Heck, many of the most contentious or known to be broken D&D spells are some of the most open-ended ones like Charm Person, and Polymorph. Nobody complains about Scorching Ray. The perfectly manageable magic system doesn't exist, everything's a trade off.
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2019-04-25, 07:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
The point isn't that we'd find perfect, the point is there'd be broader understanding that those tradeoffs and alternatives even exist.
It's like we're having a discussion about car design and some of the participants have only ever seen hatchbacks. Or talking about cellphone design in a room where half the participants think that cellphone and iphone are synonyms.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2019-04-25, 07:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Man Keeping the Martial Down
There was a Diablo-like cRPG (Dark Stone, maybe?) where the Wizard had cool out of combat utility, but the Fighter was so much better & easier to play in combat.
I think "making the game be only about one thing" *may* make it less likely that you'll get complaints about balance. But that might be overly optimistic.
On a related note… Are the colors in MtG really balanced? Do people complain about color balance, or just the balance of individual cards?
Well, IMO, that's not "best practices", it's "optimization". If what you care about is table balance, it's arguably worst practices. Of course, I'm advocating making all spells be usable at will, and then dragging the Fighter kicking and screaming up to the Wizard's level.
For that first bit… I find your stance (and analysis) most reasonable.Last edited by Quertus; 2019-04-25 at 07:25 AM.
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2019-04-25, 07:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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