Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy

[Talakeal]

NOTE: This is NOT a world building thread. It's not to talk about the implications such things would have on the setting (how everyone should be above human standards in our world if a select few are, what farming would look like, how hard the soil must be not to break apart, etc).

If anyone wants to talk about this, take it to the World Building forum with your own thread. I might even post in it. This isn't our world, these are a set of rules, not meant to build a setting. I'm not particularly concerned with the effects superhuman martials or casters would have on this world either from a world building standpoint. It's gotten to the point where several pages have been on this topic, and trying to figure out how such and such (training, extraordinary abilities, ki, just being that awesome) works from a setting/scientific point (which I severely doubt any designers have put as much thought into to justify why), which isn't the point of this thread at all.

If you do, however, want to talk about how martials are or are not superhuman/extra normal based on what we can gather, or just want to give abilites of what you think such a character can do (whether it's a low level concept, mid level concept or high level concept, as long as they make the character more in line with what's expected of how you'd perceive a Level X character, sure), this is the right spot for that.

Could you succinctly explain what this thread is supposed to be about? That's a legitimate question, not snark.

The title implies that you are going to argue with the "guy at the gym fallacy", but it seems like you actually pretty much agree with it.

Most of the initial post is about proving that the "HP as meat" interpretation is the correct one.

When people discuss what the limits of "mundane" abiltiites are or talk about the setting implications of that, you tell them they are off topic.

What do you actually want out of this thread? Fighter fixes? Caster nerfs? Lists of abilities a hypothetical extra-normal warrior could have? Lists of abilities that a "mundane" fighter could have? Stories about bad DM house rules / rulings? Ideas for good house rules / rulings?

Because without concern to setting, you might as well just copy the wizard spell list and say "all that but with sword instead of book" if you want a truly fair game.

Exactly. Nietzsche to the contrary, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually necessarily make you stronger and in fact is likely to break the body down over time. Literally every single NFL veteran suffers from horrible arthritis as a result of the immense damage they take during practice and play, and most players, despite being incredible physical specimens with all the sport of modern medicine and sports science behind them can usually only sustain play at the highest level for a handful of years (the average NFL career lasts only 3 years of so). Introducing 'super-training' that produces incredible results in terms of physical output is actually introducing phlebotinum into a setting, because it involves changing the ways that human bodies respond to damage. This form of phlebotinum is extremely common in shounen anime settings, and probably reached its apotheosis in Bleach, which utilized a massive training mini-arc in every single plotline.

This is certainly a form of phlebotinum that a setting can use, but in order to prevent it from massively distorting the world-building the barriers to training of this sort have to be extremely high. Bleach, actually, regularly makes assertions that Ichigo's psychotic training montages have some ludicrously high chance of killing him. This is a good example of something that's viable in a single-author fiction that doesn't work in a game. Ichigo will always succeed and not die because he's the protagonist, but in a game you'd have to, you know, actually roll those chances for death, and a system where if you want to level up you have to sweat a significant chance of character death simply is not a workable design.

That is definitely true.

My personal setting is post-apocalyptic, and leftover alchemy contains a bunch of lost Atlantean medical techniques that run off of ill-defined "futuristic technologies", the result of which is people who can train a lot harder than real world athletes, let alone medieval dirt farmers, without being broken.

I don't have time to try and do a proper post on this, but something about the (3rd edition) D&D rules:

1. The game provides wizards and clerics with a pretty extensive library of spells that negate 'mundane' dangers, most of which come online before level 7.
2. It follows that the game designers can assume that a 20th-level fighter going up against a 'mundane' danger has access to magic that negates the danger.
3. This means that the rules for these things aren't as important.

The parts of the game which the "Calibrating your Expectations" essay considers most like the real world are also the parts of the game where you're least likely to be able to throw a wizard or cleric at your problem. The "a 20th-level fighter is a demigod" results come from parts of the game where the designers have the least need to make rules that work like the intended physics of the setting.

Does it follow that the 20th-level fighter is just some "Guy at the Gym"? No, not really. We all know that at least the intent of the rules is that a 20th level fighter can matter to the outcome of a fight against a wyrm or a pit fiend, and that the presumed "guy at the gym" almost certainly cannot do that. But I wouldn't expect to need to be an outright demigod in order to do those things either.

Keep in mind that nobody plays D&D to actually be a "guy at the gym," that is a pejorative used by people who want to play higher powered or more flashy characters to make people with more grounded tastes look bad in comparison. At least in D&D, my World of Darkness character's physical capabilities could accurately be described as "girl at the gym."

Most people (or at least me) want to play a fantasy action hero like Conan, Rambo, Link, Aragorn, Captain America, Batman, King Arthur, Roland, Achilles, etc. And there is very little that D&D expects of a level 20 adventure that such a character couldn't conceivably contribute to, especially when decked out in a level 20 characters WBL worth of magic items.


Edit: @ Max_Killjoy: In real life elite athletes are far above the capabilities of lifelong physical laborers. I don't see why this wouldn't be true in a fantasy world, especially if the elites have access to proper nutrition and medicine, especially if it is magically augmented. Also, a lot of games deal with magical bloodlines and the idea that the ruling class is literally better than you by birth, so you might have issues of greater genetic diversity than are found in the real world where some characters are simply better than others.

Note that this doesn't explain the kind of crazy disparity that some posters are asking for, but it does allow for a world where you can have a knight who can kill dozens of ordinary men but farmers aren't stronger than their plowhorse.

[Quertus]

If you are serious about this, we can play out the scenario. But I am going to need a lot more information; is the portal natural, a spell, and artifact, etc.? How long do I have? How powerful are the guardians? How deep and dark is the water? What is the sediment like? Is it a lake or an ocean? By "contribution" do you mean acting as part of a party? Acting alone with NPC support? Or acting totally self sufficiently?

@Quertus: Still thinking about your underwater fit puzzle, and without a lot of context making it urgent it actually sounds like something a high level character wouldn't bother interacting with personally, it is probably best solved by contracting a bunch of unskilled laborers, a few low level sailors and masons, and maybe a few mid level clerics or conjurers.

Wow. Just that statement - "I'll need more information" - is itself quite telling. But I'll hold my thoughts on that for later.

I don't actually remember the details (darn senility), so let's make some up.

Let's say that the party has defeated an extraplanar princess-napper - ie, stolen the princess back, and taken the artifact that allowed him to abduct said princess in the first place. Now, he is trapped in his realm, and the princess is safe.

Unfortunately, a "natural" portal to his plane exists in the world. The party wants not only to close said portal before the being can find it & come through, but also to guard the portal in case he does come through.

The portal in question was caused by a magical battle/accident that sent an ancient city beneath the waves. The portal is located maybe a few hundred feet down, maybe only a couple hundred feet off shore. The terrain is a mix of rubble and sediment. Most people (and most normal things) tend to avoid the area as "cursed"/unnatural.

The guardians are… not individually terribly powerful, but they are numerous, in addition to being both incorporeal and invisible. Their "attacks" (ie, contact with them) disrupts just about everything, causing decay / spontaneous breaks (as a descriptor of their damage type - and it also affects objects), as well as potentially disrupting systems (occasionally causing fatigue, forcing spell failure chances, etc).

The guardians seem to (almost always) ignore things above the water. However, boats passing through the area occasionally suffer sudden malfunctions (leaks, rotten wood, nails popping out) to their submerged components, And there are no (natural) fish near the sunken city, so sailors generally just avoid the area. (Mechanically, random encounters with the guardians begin beneath the waves, but they are much more common deeper underwater. Many cluster near the portal.)

I'm not asking your Fighter to solo this - although, if they can, bonus! - I'm merely asking whether the party compares the Martial to this scenario and asks, "and why did we bring him along, again?", and, if not, just what would the Martial characters in your games be contributing to resolving this scenario.

Because what's possible to achieve by pushing the human body is possible to achieve by pushing the human body.

There's no "homo sapiens adventurous" subspecies that "adventurers" come from that makes them different from other humans.

So, let's say that, IRL, there's some formula we could use to compare capability to training. Suppose most people have training numbers in the range of 0-1; marathon runners have training values of maybe 2 or so; Olympic athletes have higher values. So, suppose the value of training could be given by, some base + (training ^ ½). Because it requires exponentially more training to get smaller and smaller bonuses. Now, suppose the god of physics in another world decided that training should work differently. Suppose that they decide to add a factor like (.027 * (training ^5)), and modified the base and/or the multiplier on the value of (training ^ ½) so that, for low values of training, the worlds looked really similar, but, for higher levels of training, they were noticeably divergent.

Or, just like how bumblebees can fly, the one set of rules (world physics) that bumblebees and jets both follow are complex, and produce seemingly divergent results at different "levels". Or like the expected trajectories of a shotput vs a paper wad - both use the same physics, but are seemingly affected differently because of their "proportions".

Modifying air resistance affects the paper wad more; modifying gravity affects the shotput more. Why do you reject the possibility of modifying world physics such that things only seem significantly different once you get closer to one end of the scale?

[Psyren]

What do you actually want out of this thread? Fighter fixes? Caster nerfs? Lists of abilities a hypothetical extra-normal warrior could have? Lists of abilities that a "mundane" fighter could have? Stories about bad DM house rules / rulings? Ideas for good house rules / rulings?

Because without concern to setting, you might as well just copy the wizard spell list and say "all that but with sword instead of book" if you want a truly fair game.

This is my frustration as well. What is the endgame here?

The L20 fighter gets stabbed be a goblin and it's just a "glancing blow". Another goblin stabs them and it's it's a critical hit, which is to say you must have had vital anatomy to hit you in, but this wound is just a larger "flesh wound". This happens several times a day, every day. It's obvious a normal humanoid has no chance to seriously hurt the fighter by stabbing them once.

Likewise the fighter has no chance of being burnt to death by the exact same flow of lava that kills commoner ten times over.

Once again, please let's not reopen the "are HP meat" discussion, as that will only get the thread locked.

It means that XP and level serve as an rough indicator of power.

It means that it shouldn't make sense to say a L20 fighter is about the equal of a L12 wizard (without adding qualifications). Because sending XP on a caster class shouldn't be categorically more efficient that spending it on a martial class.

More specifically, I think it was a reference to early editions when different classes cost a different amount of XP; this was removed but the classes weren't balanced: therefore a a 3e wizard is getting more for their XP than a 3e monk.[/QUOTE]

Unless each class has exactly the same abilities, like checkers pieces, you're going to run into situations where a level X member of one class is going to be able to handle the same challenge as a level X+Y in another. I would much rather have meaningful difference in ability even if that means Wizard X = Fighter X+Y. Besides which, again, comparing PCs against one another is not the point of D&D to begin with.

[AntiAuthority]

That or maybe they mean embezzlement in that the Level X fighter included in a party with an Level X wizard and getting an equal share of a CR Y challenge isn't actually pulling their weight.

That also seems likely. Ties back into my it reducing levels to a meaningless number bit. For example, my 5E Barbarian is pretty much worthless outside of killing the enemy dead... And he can't even fly yet. I was kind of screwed a few games ago when a vampire just spider-climbed out of my reach and the entire party (made up of martials except for the Bard that doesn't have many utility spells and the NPC Cleric that's a healbot) were more or less just wondering, "Now what?" I remember my character got spider-climb, I believe we found an item that gave it to one of us, but my memory is already fuzzy.

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I think it's fair to say, in-universe, that your fighter is "not supernatural but human growth isn't capped the same way here"- all the physically impossible monsters are physically impossible, and not all of them are clearly magic, so some of them probably don't abide by the rules of physics.

It's also fair to say that your fighter "is in some way extranormal as a direct result of all the monsters you've slain", and it's not a thing they're conciously tapping into, but at the point where "guy at the gym" and the mechanics start clashing, they're already "magic" or "imbued with the unnatural-but-nonmagic power of the monsters he's slain" or "he's tapped into some secret pool of power".

Either way, I think it's unfair of the DM to say "you're not allowed to survive what the rules say you should", and it's rude of the DM to say "no, you're actually magic". If the player says "There's no way I could survive that" or something similar, if the player *wants* to "guy at the gym", make sure they're aware that "not doing that" is an option. If the worldbuilding doesn't reconcile, figure out a way to make it reconcile.

Maybe the method is adventuring without another powersource, which is already a notoriously lethal career. Maybe the method is physically fighting monsters. It doesn't have to make more sense than learning to twist reality with your thoughts by reading or learning to heal people by being very religious. (Or if it does, go fix those too before you start talking about fixing this stuff.)

Personally, if we're playing at high levels, it should be more like mythological figures fighting than normal humans. I like the idea of rogues being able to hide so well that even magic has a hard time finding them. I like the idea of Fighters being near impossible for a Wizard to put down. I like the idea of slipping from "clearly human superhero" as per a consistent comic setting that doesn't screw with powerlevels to Justice League Batman, where clearly there's something up with their survival besides what normal human or tech can provide. I don't want Fighters and Rogues to be general utility- Wizards are always more of a general utility class than them- instead, I want them to be incredibly good at their niche, which is "occupying attention and stabbing things" and "Sneaking around, stealing stuff, and stabbing things by surprise" respectively. Horrifyingly good, good enough that they still make Wizards scared, but in combat, one trick taken to Wizard-scaring extremes.

I never thought of it that way... Has my seal of approval. The issue is, they're not the best at what they do, they could be replaced by a Caster just using a spell to replicate their abilities.

But I feel it doesn't need some deeply profound explanation for why a human can kill stuff and become bigger, better, faster, stronger... I know, I needed to do it. Thinking about what you said earlier If it's "magic permeates the air" I'm fine with that even if it's not my cup of tea, if it's "training really hard lets you unlock more powerful" that's also cool or just "you're that awesome" is also fine. The justification for why is definitely going to vary from DM to DM, I'm more partial to just training really hard myself.

And no, being able to kill a bear several times over in a single attack but struggling to break down a metal barrier is really weird and makes me question, "So am I just a normal guy that's killed like a bunch of animals that should disembowel me in a single swipe on a daily basis or superhuman...?"

But I do agree that by the time your level passes into the double digits, you're probably looking at someone from mythology or something along those lines in terms of power. Along with questioning how this seemingly normal fighter is alive after getting chewed on by a giant monster and is walking around just fine...

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Could you succinctly explain what this thread is supposed to be about? That's a legitimate question, not snark.

The title implies that you are going to argue with the "guy at the gym fallacy", but it seems like you actually pretty much agree with it.

I'm critiquing how martials are apparently able to do blatantly superhuman things in combat but are expected by people to be normal humans in other scenarios. Doing several times more damage than a monster has HP but struggling to get through a metal door/bars with the same weapon/damage.

As for what it's supposed to be about... Talk about why you think martials are just "guys at the gym"/bound by the rules of our reality or aren't, as well as giving them abilities appropriate for a character of the level you envision them at/to remain relevant at higher levels. I don't think I can break it down any further than that.

Most of the initial post is about proving that the "HP as meat" interpretation is the correct one.

Yes, but I do have to question what's being damaged when an attack hits... Or spells called "Cure Wounds" and "Regenerate" affect Hit Points if they're not reflecting actual damage done to the body. Or why Resistance/Damage Reduction stops hit points from being lost if they don't reflect durability. Or what's happening when a character is apparently submerged in lava for about 2 rounds but isn't dead/immediately hospitalized as well as what's being damaged when they're doing this if it's not their bodies.

When people discuss what the limits of "mundane" abiltiites are or talk about the setting implications of that, you tell them they are off topic.

Where did I say mundane abilities were off topic in this thread? If you can quote me, go ahead, I'll apologize for it, but I don't remember saying they were off topic.

Setting implications, however, is off topic. Figuring out how powers would change the setting is not what this thread is about.

What do you actually want out of this thread? Fighter fixes? Caster nerfs? Lists of abilities a hypothetical extra-normal warrior could have? Lists of abilities that a "mundane" fighter could have? Stories about bad DM house rules / rulings? Ideas for good house rules / rulings?

Fighter fixes? Yes. List of abilities for a hypothetical extra-normal warrior? Yeah. List of abilities a mundane fighter could have? Also yes. Ideas for good house rules/rulings to help fighters out? Sure.

[malachi]

Taking on tasks "1000 times" harder doesn't tap some hidden human potential.

And really, I'd question the assertion that the adventurer's raw physical experience is that much harder than a quasi-medieval, pre-industrial laborer.

The laborer has different skills, but the daily grind is at least as hard over time.




If there's that much gap between them, then having them at the same level is bad game design bordering on the dishonest.

Here's the thing, the properties of the real world come with explanations built in. So if something works in your game the way it does in the real world, you simply use that pre-existing explanation and reference it accordingly. For anything that you invent or change, by contrast, you have to design the explanation, you can't rely upon a legacy of centuries of world by countless scientists to back you up, there's just you, the designer and a limited amount of playtesting to try and make sure that your design works.

Changing how the human body works is a pretty big thing to change. It requires a lot of design work to make function in a reasonable way. It's not impossible, but it's a major element. If you're going to tell a story about humans who are different, it probably should be a central part of your game design and you need a lot of detail and many subsequent decisions to pin down how it's going to actually work. Eclipse Phase, notably, makes changing how the human body works a central plank of its setting and system, and there's a massive amount of effort involved in dealing with the transhumanism that game embraces.

You can't just handwave superhuman training regimes into being, but only for a specific set of occupations, without either sacrificing coherency or doing a lot more work (and again, it's fine to sacrifice coherency, but if that's what you've decided to do there's nothing more to discuss). Changing the definition of 'human' for a game is a BFD, something that can be the entirety of a fantasy or science fiction game.

Doesn't XP in DnD (especially as defined in 3.5, where it literally only comes from killing monsters) already meat the criteria for "changing how the human body works"?

If I read enough books to become a level 1 wizard, and then am involved in the killing of enough monsters to become a level 20 wizard, I gain a whole heck of a lot of power and can now cast level 9 spells.

If I worked and trained hard enough to become a level 1 fighter, and then am involved in the killing of exactly the same number of monsters as the wizard, the rules tell me that I gain certain abilities (can kill a dragon in under a minute). Now, as per the OP, some DMs still say that I can't break down this metal door because that's 'too unrealistic', despite allowing me to hack a dragon to death in less than a minute (and then, sometimes, use the dragon's scales to create armor stronger than whatever metal the door is made out of).

Exactly. Nietzsche to the contrary, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually necessarily make you stronger and in fact is likely to break the body down over time. Literally every single NFL veteran suffers from horrible arthritis as a result of the immense damage they take during practice and play, and most players, despite being incredible physical specimens with all the sport of modern medicine and sports science behind them can usually only sustain play at the highest level for a handful of years (the average NFL career lasts only 3 years of so). Introducing 'super-training' that produces incredible results in terms of physical output is actually introducing phlebotinum into a setting, because it involves changing the ways that human bodies respond to damage. This form of phlebotinum is extremely common in shounen anime settings, and probably reached its apotheosis in Bleach, which utilized a massive training mini-arc in every single plotline.

This is certainly a form of phlebotinum that a setting can use, but in order to prevent it from massively distorting the world-building the barriers to training of this sort have to be extremely high. Bleach, actually, regularly makes assertions that Ichigo's psychotic training montages have some ludicrously high chance of killing him. This is a good example of something that's viable in a single-author fiction that doesn't work in a game. Ichigo will always succeed and not die because he's the protagonist, but in a game you'd have to, you know, actually roll those chances for death, and a system where if you want to level up you have to sweat a significant chance of character death simply is not a workable design.

But DnD, and many other games with a combat-focus, already do implement this phlebotinum that has a "significant chance of character death" in order to level up in the form of XP (the actual chances of a character dying are based on the difficulty set up by the DM).

[Lemmy]

Personally, I like the idea of high level martials using, as someone put it: "augmented physics", where they don't have the same general utility and versatility of Magic, but can still pull impossible exaggerations of mundane accomplishments by having superhuman levels of strength, skill, will power, etc.

The laws of physics of a typical D&D world are alreary quite malleable and very different from those of the real world. Even low-level character can do stuff that is impossible IRL (even without mentioning hp).

In a world of myths and legends come to life, where physics is at best ill-defined and inconsistent, why is it that only Magic can challenge reality?

If certain classes are meant to stay within the realm of power of low-levels, then they shouldn't have more than 5 or 6 levels. If they have 20, then they are meant to at point reach the level of power and influence expected of high CR creatures.

- - -

IMO, the best way to handle it is give all sorts of abilities to characters, impossible or not, make them all balanced to whatever level they show up... Then mark the more physics-breaking ones with a [mythic] tag or something... Then players and GMs could choose whether or not to allow them in their games, depending on how much they like the "guy at the gym" style of game.

It's important to keep in mind that these [mythic/ legendary/ whatever] abilities should still be balanced with other abilties of same level. The tag should be about flavor and visuals, not power.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm critiquing how martials are apparently able to do blatantly superhuman things in combat but are expected by people to be normal humans in other scenarios. Doing several times more damage than a monster has HP but struggling to get through a metal door/bars with the same weapon/damage.

As for what it's supposed to be about... Talk about why you think martials are just "guys at the gym"/bound by the rules of our reality or aren't, as well as giving them abilities appropriate for a character of the level you envision them at/to remain relevant at higher levels. I don't think I can break it down any further than that.

...

Fighter fixes? Yes. List of abilities for a hypothetical extra-normal warrior? Yeah. List of abilities a mundane fighter could have? Also yes. Ideas for good house rules/rulings to help fighters out? Sure.

...

Where did I say mundane abilities were off topic in this thread? If you can quote me, go ahead, I'll apologize for it, but I don't remember saying they were off topic.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to do ANY of those things, because you follow up with this:

Setting implications, however, is off topic. Figuring out how powers would change the setting is not what this thread is about.

Whether or not an act is superhuman, depends on the setting.
Whether a monster is more durable than steel bars, depends on the setting.
Whether or not there's a disconnect between a fighter's combat power level and their non-combat power level, depends in part on the setting.
Whether the game's "GATG" is bound by real-world "GATG" limits or some other limits, depends on the setting.

What is and is not "mundane", what is and is not extranormal/fantastic, even what "GATG" means... depends on the setting.

If you can't tell me anything about the setting, about the sorts of characters to be played, and the ends and steepness of the power scale they inhabit, about the sorts of campaigns you want to run, about the "story" you want to tell if that's your thing... then I cannot tell you what sort of powers the spellcasters or the martials or anyone else should have, or about how to balance any of it.

Even if we're just talking about theory, with no particular setting in mind, these issues are still there.

You're literally asking me to work in a vacuum.

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Doesn't XP in DnD (especially as defined in 3.5, where it literally only comes from killing monsters) already meat the criteria for "changing how the human body works"?

If I read enough books to become a level 1 wizard, and then am involved in the killing of enough monsters to become a level 20 wizard, I gain a whole heck of a lot of power and can now cast level 9 spells.

If I worked and trained hard enough to become a level 1 fighter, and then am involved in the killing of exactly the same number of monsters as the wizard, the rules tell me that I gain certain abilities (can kill a dragon in under a minute). Now, as per the OP, some DMs still say that I can't break down this metal door because that's 'too unrealistic', despite allowing me to hack a dragon to death in less than a minute (and then, sometimes, use the dragon's scales to create armor stronger than whatever metal the door is made out of).

I don't think XP actually exists, it's an abstraction of something, not a thing itself. The fiction-level character doesn't literally gain or "feel" XP.

[Florian]

NOTE: This is NOT a world building thread. It's not to talk about the implications such things would have on the setting

You can´t really separate those two aspects when talking about that topic on a D&D forum / with people based on the simulation principle. In this case, there is no difference between the rules system, the rules to play the game and the function of the rules as part of representing the game world, being one half of the window / interface to it (the other being the GM).

Quite a lot of games are based on the principle of "assume that things behave like in the real world, with standard physics.", which is coupled with a) "The game mechanics serve the function to handle disputes and simulate individual actions and tasks in the game world" and b) "We provide rules to handle the exceptions that are created by fantasy / science fiction / horror elements that are part of the game, but not our real world".

This means quite a lot of things. Amongst them, that "generic systems" are not as generic as they claim to be, when their build-in calibration points for nearly everything is based on our real world. For example, earlier D&D editions used the attribute range of 3-18 as the "human range", with only fighters being able to reach a special category of the 18 STR range, while dragons and such peaked in the 25 range. D&D 3rd and 4th streamlines that a bit, but still used 10/+0 as the default "human range".

So, you start changing stuff away from the "as in the real world"-principle, the more far reaching the changes, the more you have to think about _what exactly_ it is that you are now simulating in the game world. See some decades of endless discussions what implications the existance of certain spells or other magical stuff could have on a setting.

The whole thing becomes less of an issue when looking at "conflict resolution"-based systems, instead of "action / task"-based systems, because mostly, you're now focussing on story and impact, instead of simulation and the "human range".

For example, it´s pretty valid to play the cast of the Avengers using Marvel Heroic Role-play or Fate Core with no noticeable difference between the Black Widow and Dr. Strange (in terms of power), with the caveat emptor being that you have to accept that you are playing "finished" characters which can't experience growth in the sense that more traditional systems (D&D, Gurps, DSA and so on...) offer, but only change.

[Lucas Yew]

You've summed it up pretty well. The characters both have the same number, but one is much more valuable than the other. The Fighter is cool and all, but the Wizard can do the Fighter's job and more with some prep time.

And I'm assuming XP embezzlement means you're wasting levels in a class that you think will be able to stay relevant at later levels?

That or maybe they mean embezzlement in that the Level X fighter included in a party with an Level X wizard and getting an equal share of a CR Y challenge isn't actually pulling their weight.

It means that XP and level serve as an rough indicator of power.

It means that it shouldn't make sense to say a L20 fighter is about the equal of a L12 wizard (without adding qualifications). Because sending XP on a caster class shouldn't be categorically more efficient that spending it on a martial class.

More specifically, I think it was a reference to early editions when different classes cost a different amount of XP; this was removed but the classes weren't balanced: therefore a a 3e wizard is getting more for their XP than a 3e monk.

Basically all of this. Sorry for the abstract phrase.

Unless each class has exactly the same abilities, like checkers pieces, you're going to run into situations where a level X member of one class is going to be able to handle the same challenge as a level X+Y in another. I would much rather have meaningful difference in ability even if that means Wizard X = Fighter X+Y. Besides which, again, comparing PCs against one another is not the point of D&D to begin with.

That totally became a thing when 3.X defined PC class level = CR, alas. Or maybe even older than that, when warriors and wizards started to appear as campaign BBEGs.

[Florian]

Doesn't XP in DnD (especially as defined in 3.5, where it literally only comes from killing monsters) already meat the criteria for "changing how the human body works"?

Not really. First, it´s a pretty big abstraction that is deeply involved with the other abstraction, class levels.
It´s actually easier if you tackle class levels first. Which one comes first: You gain enough XP to hit a new level, suddenly, your HP, BAB, Saves and all this potentially make a jump, or you train all those individual parts during the actual action and lots and lots of off screen downtime, gradually increasing all that stuff and when that stuff is up, your class level makes a jump? Consider Wizards gaining two new spells per level for free. Those are spells they researched and developed during their down time, which transfers to a Wizard making the jump from 4 to 5 and learning fireball means that he practiced learning 3rd level spells now for quite some time.

The more unfortunate situation is XP being a "carrot and stick" for players. Earlier D&D editions had a GP/EXP exchange rate, with the rate favoring clever thinking about slaughtering monsters, late editions moved that to the "encounter" format.

[Psyren]

You only get XP for overcoming challenges. After a while, a commoner tilling his field is not overcoming any sort of challenge, he's just rolling a Profession check. That is why commoners don't hit 20th level (or even 10th level, or 5th!) even when they've been at it for decades.

Now if they're dealing with other sorts of challenges - orc raiders for instance, or natural disasters - that's a different story, but then the XP they're getting is based on the CR of those encounters, not the simple act of farming.

In 3.5, XP sort of exists in-universe since it's a resource that can be used for things like crafting and casting spells. In PF and 5e, it's purely a game construct that can even be dispensed with (and should, imo) in favor of story milestone leveling.

Fighter fixes? Yes. List of abilities for a hypothetical extra-normal warrior? Yeah. List of abilities a mundane fighter could have? Also yes. Ideas for good house rules/rulings to help fighters out? Sure.

Not to be repetitive, but Path of War really does address all of these.

That totally became a thing when 3.X defined PC class level = CR, alas. Or maybe even older than that, when warriors and wizards started to appear as campaign BBEGs.

Alas, I'm well aware of this guideline and have railed against it many times before. It's useless for any kind of PvP comparison, it completely ignores optimization or even basic player skill, and it ignores itemization completely. Its only benefit other than starting forum arguments is for playgroups that aren't trying to use it as holy writ for class balance discussions.

[AntiAuthority]

Doesn't XP in DnD (especially as defined in 3.5, where it literally only comes from killing monsters) already meat the criteria for "changing how the human body works"?

If I read enough books to become a level 1 wizard, and then am involved in the killing of enough monsters to become a level 20 wizard, I gain a whole heck of a lot of power and can now cast level 9 spells.

If I worked and trained hard enough to become a level 1 fighter, and then am involved in the killing of exactly the same number of monsters as the wizard, the rules tell me that I gain certain abilities (can kill a dragon in under a minute). Now, as per the OP, some DMs still say that I can't break down this metal door because that's 'too unrealistic', despite allowing me to hack a dragon to death in less than a minute (and then, sometimes, use the dragon's scales to create armor stronger than whatever metal the door is made out of).

But DnD, and many other games with a combat-focus, already do implement this phlebotinum that has a "significant chance of character death" in order to level up in the form of XP (the actual chances of a character dying are based on the difficulty set up by the DM).

Hm, that is one way to look at it... I agree actually. No amount of getting more skilled is going to make your body tougher (maybe better at mitigating damage, but I don't think that'll matter much if something like a Flame Giant hits you and you're just a normal guy) or faster (dodging lightning/explosions). Some of it could be explained with you becoming more experienced in where to place your strikes, but... I really don't think experience is going to help when a monster that's large enough to fit you into its (likely razor sharp teeth filled) mouth bites you and you come out of it ok.

I mean, if HP counts as dodging (for example), I'm still impressed they're consistently dodging attacks from monsters that should, by all rights, be swinging a lot faster than anyone in the real world would be capable of. Even moreso since humans can't dodge attacks from other people 100% of the time, they're doing things that trained athletes from our world couldn't.

---

Personally, I like the idea of high level martials using, as someone put it: "augmented physics", where they don't have the same general utility and versatility of Magic, but can still pull impossible exaggerations of mundane accomplishments by having superhuman levels of strength, skill, will power, etc.

The laws of physics of a typical D&D world are alreary quite malleable and very different from those of the real world. Even low-level character can do stuff that is impossible IRL (even without mentioning hp).

In a world of myths and legends come to life, where physics is at best ill-defined and inconsistent, why is it that only Magic can challenge reality?

If certain classes are meant to stay within the realm of power of low-levels, then they shouldn't have more than 5 or 6 levels. If they have 20, then they are meant to at point reach the level of power and influence expected of high CR creatures.

- - -

IMO, the best way to handle it is give all sorts of abilities to characters, impossible or not, make them all balanced to whatever level they show up... Then mark the more physics-breaking ones with a [mythic] tag or something... Then players and GMs could choose whether or not to allow them in their games, depending on how much they like the "guy at the gym" style of game.

It's important to keep in mind that these [mythic/ legendary/ whatever] abilities should still be balanced with other abilties of same level. The tag should be about flavor and visuals, not power.

Hm, yeah, the not advancing beyond 5 or 6 is why E6 exists. I can understand wanting a normal guy to punch out, say, a Stone Giant, but at that point, even a glancing blow from the beast should end said normal person.

But limiting such characters that are meant to stay as ordinary humans to not get progression at higher levels makes sense. If a character is Level 20, they probably aren't as vulnerable as normal humans since, RAW, they can apparently survive being in lava for a few rounds and come out of it injured, but alive.

And the mythics tag sounds a lot like the extraordinary tag from Pathfinder... Ignoring Pathfinder has Mythic Tiers, but I mean the general idea is the same.

[Talakeal]

As for what it's supposed to be about... Talk about why you think martials are just "guys at the gym"/bound by the rules of our reality or aren't, as well as giving them abilities appropriate for a character of the level you envision them at/to remain relevant at higher levels. I don't think I can break it down any further than that.

Yes, but I do have to question what's being damaged when an attack hits... Or spells called "Cure Wounds" and "Regenerate" affect Hit Points if they're not reflecting actual damage done to the body. Or why Resistance/Damage Reduction stops hit points from being lost if they don't reflect durability. Or what's happening when a character is apparently submerged in lava for about 2 rounds but isn't dead/immediately hospitalized as well as what's being damaged when they're doing this if it's not their bodies.

Where did I say mundane abilities were off topic in this thread? If you can quote me, go ahead, I'll apologize for it, but I don't remember saying they were off topic.

Setting implications, however, is off topic. Figuring out how powers would change the setting is not what this thread is about.

Fighter fixes? Yes. List of abilities for a hypothetical extra-normal warrior? Yeah. List of abilities a mundane fighter could have? Also yes. Ideas for good house rules/rulings to help fighters out? Sure.

As I said before, HP are an inconsistent mess no matter how you look at them.

You didn't say mundane abilities were off topic, you said discussing where the line between mundane and magical abilities was, iirc.

I have been working on a 3.X fighter fix as well as a way of porting the martial maneuvar system from Heart of Darkness to D&D, I suppose I could polish them up and post a copy as that seems to fit the bill.

Also, as has been said before, you should really check out Tome of Battle and Path of War if you haven't already. Heck, Exalted might also be a good source of inspiration.

Wow. Just that statement - "I'll need more information" - is itself quite telling. But I'll hold my thoughts on that for later.

I don't actually remember the details (darn senility), so let's make some up.

Let's say that the party has defeated an extraplanar princess-napper - ie, stolen the princess back, and taken the artifact that allowed him to abduct said princess in the first place. Now, he is trapped in his realm, and the princess is safe.

Unfortunately, a "natural" portal to his plane exists in the world. The party wants not only to close said portal before the being can find it & come through, but also to guard the portal in case he does come through.

The portal in question was caused by a magical battle/accident that sent an ancient city beneath the waves. The portal is located maybe a few hundred feet down, maybe only a couple hundred feet off shore. The terrain is a mix of rubble and sediment. Most people (and most normal things) tend to avoid the area as "cursed"/unnatural.

The guardians are… not individually terribly powerful, but they are numerous, in addition to being both incorporeal and invisible. Their "attacks" (ie, contact with them) disrupts just about everything, causing decay / spontaneous breaks (as a descriptor of their damage type - and it also affects objects), as well as potentially disrupting systems (occasionally causing fatigue, forcing spell failure chances, etc).

The guardians seem to (almost always) ignore things above the water. However, boats passing through the area occasionally suffer sudden malfunctions (leaks, rotten wood, nails popping out) to their submerged components, And there are no (natural) fish near the sunken city, so sailors generally just avoid the area. (Mechanically, random encounters with the guardians begin beneath the waves, but they are much more common deeper underwater. Many cluster near the portal.)

I'm not asking your Fighter to solo this - although, if they can, bonus! - I'm merely asking whether the party compares the Martial to this scenario and asks, "and why did we bring him along, again?", and, if not, just what would the Martial characters in your games be contributing to resolving this scenario.

Cool. I'll need some time to think about it.

Those are more than incorporeal / ethereal guardians, those are almost like living spheres of annihilation. Are they intentionally designed to be only vulnerable to magic? I don't see that written above, but it seems kind of like its implied, and if so that might not be a fair test anymore than replacing them with creatures that had spell immunity, projected an anti-magic field, and the tarrasque's reflective carapace.

HP as not-meat works like that. (also as not a force-field or some other explicit conceit)

The L20 fighter gets stabbed be a goblin and it's just a "glancing blow". Another goblin stabs them and it's it's a critical hit, which is to say you must have had vital anatomy to hit you in, but this wound is just a larger "flesh wound". This happens several times a day, every day. It's obvious a normal humanoid has no chance to seriously hurt the fighter by stabbing them once.

Likewise the fighter has no chance of being burnt to death by the exact same flow of lava that kills commoner ten times over.

When the fighter gets healed, they need a cleric as skilled as they are because the same experience that makes the fireproof and un-directly-stab-able means the cure minor wounds spell can only heal them a little bit, whereas it can heal a less skilled person who is grievously wounded.What logic?

As I have said repeatedly, HP is an incoherent mess no matter how you look at it. But at its core, a lot of the absurd edge cases people come up with just don't come up in game. I have never had a character fully immersed in lava, let alone a character who didn't have some sort of supernatural protection, it just isn't something that happens. AD&D had "inescapable death" rules for such situations, but I never actually saw them used, because those are really bizarre situations.

The druid establishes the presence of a high water table in the environment based on the GM's flavor description. The druid pulls hundreds of 5' cubes of water from the ground, and uses these to build bridges (5' section, freeze, get more water, repeat), freeze locks open, create traps to drop seven ton blocks of ice on monster's heads.

The druid doesn't get tired because there's the rules that limit cantrips use and nothing in real life to provide as a reference.

Likewise the DM let's the locks be frozen open because locks aren't creatures, and so that limit can't be applied to anything not listed as a creature in a monster manual.
The ice block trap kill the lich, because there's no way a human skeleton could withstand that blow.

I would absolutely give someone abusing cantrips like that fatigue. That is actually one of the reasons that I don't like the 5E style at-will cantrips; firing off a fire bolt every turn of combat is fine, but out of combat people will pull ridiculous carp like this.

Each individual application sounds ok though, although most of them are certainly beyond the power of a cantrip.

What logic?

If you model the world Wild Bill lived in, acting like Wild Bill is stupid as 90% of game sessions would end with Bill dead without accomplishing anything.

If you create a game where his actions were likely to creates his outcomes, you've left realism behind as surely as if you've added wizards. Except you probably haven't addressed at all why Bill has these special powers or thought through the implications of your setting because you've tricked yourself into thinking realism is involved.

Ok, this is a tough one. I didn't do a very good job of explaining it before, I will try again.

Someone who becomes a "living legend" often has a survivor bias on their side, and you can model this in the game rules.

Although accounts are often exaggerated, Wild Bill was a real person in the real world who survived an inordinate number of gun fights. You can't get any more realism than this.

If you were trying to model one of Wild Bill's gunfights, you could go the traditional route of giving him a chance of being killed, because he could have died. But here's the thing, he didn't die in that battle. So you could also make a simulation where his death isn't a possibility. Both would be historically accurate, depending on how you look at it.

So it was "realistic" that Wild Bill survived a bunch of gun fights, because it really happened. Why would it be any less realistic for a fantasy fighter to survive a bunch of sword fights?

You just go into the game with the assumption that you are telling a narrative about heroes, not about random would be heroes who died and were forgotten. Would a hero die to a random stab from a goblin? Probably not. So you don't put the rules in the game, even though it theoretically could happen, just like you don't put rules in the game for tripping over your own feet and breaking your neck, or having a stroke mid adventure, or cutting yourself on your rusty spurs and dying of tetnis; even though those all could happen in the narrative, they are sufficiently unlikely that you don't bother putting in rules for them.

So, you go into the game knowing you are going to be playing the guys who would go on to be heroes of legend, not one of the hundreds of other guys who didn't make it. So you build in survivor bias into the mechanics of the game.

To use a couple more examples; its incredibly unlikely that someone wins the lottery, but people do win the lottery almost every week. If I want to write a gritty realistic story about a lottery winner, it isn't unrealistic that they happen to win the lottery in chapter five, its merely a selection bias.

Games Workshop's Middle Earth game does something similar with a mechanic called fate. In that game fate can be used to avoid a potentially deadly wound through good luck, and the game determines how many fate characters get based on whether or not they survived in the book. So, for example, Bilbo would have more fate than Thorin if you are simulating the Battle of Five Armies, because while Bilbo theoretically could have died (or Thorin lived) that isn't what happened, so the game goes out of its way to make sure its simulation is likely to result in achieving what actually happened.

If I worked and trained hard enough to become a level 1 fighter, and then am involved in the killing of exactly the same number of monsters as the wizard, the rules tell me that I gain certain abilities (can kill a dragon in under a minute). Now, as per the OP, some DMs still say that I can't break down this metal door because that's 'too unrealistic', despite allowing me to hack a dragon to death in less than a minute (and then, sometimes, use the dragon's scales to create armor stronger than whatever metal the door is made out of).

First off, going by the rules, a fighter who can kill a dragon in under a minute can almost certainly destroy a door in under a minute.

Second, dragons are large animate living creatures, doors are not. Dragons have weak spots, and it is possible to use their own weight and momentum against them in combat, not so much with a door.

Third, this involves a couple of weird quirks of the D20 system. Doors are very hard to break down, because the d20 is swingy and the strength modifier is relatively small, and with the take 20 rules any random scrub can eventually break down a door that a hulking behemoth could reliable break down in one go. Also, doors have hardness, which is overcome by adamant, and dragons have damage reduction, which is over come by magic weapons; why? Who knows.

Fourth, while its easy to imagine the fighter and the dragon just sitting there trading blows (after all, that's what the models are doing), the fiction is probably better served by imagining a more dramatic fight where the fighter is performing all sorts of stunts and using the terrain; climbing on the dragons back to stab its eye, getting it tangled in chains, tricking it into sticking its head through a narrow archway, stabbing it in the mouth while it is getting ready to breath, etc. Most human vs. dragon fights in movies involve all sorts of clever stunts and tricks involving the terrain.

Using in-RL analogies, if I were a supervisor of a fantasy PMC's new recruits division and got two applicants for a single job opportunity, a Fighter 17 and a Wizard 17, guess who is the more valuable recruit considering only exclusive (read:not skills nor requisite-free feats nor magical equipment) abilities:
One, a person who fights giant monsters in a super awesome martial arts style and manage to survive each time;
Two, a person who can produce the former result by torching with intense heat energy concentration, plus install multiple barriers that can block similar assaults from potential enemy forces, plus detect such possible assaults a day ago, plus can vacate the executive members through spacetime in an emergency breach, and so much more, all in a single day, and can completely swap such options each day.

This isn't an issue with mundane vs. magical characters, its an issue with D&D being terrible at class design.

A fighter is less powerful and less versatile than most other classes, while also happening to be mundane. The war-mage has the same problem despite being magical.
A wizard is more powerful and more versatile than most other classes, while also happening to be magical.

Try comparing a bard and a war-mage instead. The bard is versatile, but not especially powerful, and happens to be magical. The war-blade is powerful, but not especially versatile, and happens to be mundane. The choice here isn't so clear cut, and really depends on the job, and ideally the best choice is a mixture of classes, a "balanced party" if you will.

[AntiAuthority]

As I said before, HP are an inconsistent mess no matter how you look at them.

Yeah, and I agree with you that my definition probably isn't 100% perfect either (such as dinosaurs with plenty of HP surviving falling from the stratosphere), but it makes the most sense to me based on what I can put together for the reasons I brought up earlier. I don't have all the answers, but I am learning some things and my perspective has changed while reading this thread.

You didn't say mundane abilities were off topic, you said discussing where the line between mundane and magical abilities was, iirc.

I didn't say that either... Just the world building implications of, say, fantasy soil being harder than our soil, average humans in the setting being able to outwork farm animals and such.

I don't see how soil density or the powers of average humans ties into superhuman/extra normal martial characters that can compete against high CR enemies/stay relevant when put next to high level casters. Take Saitama, as I used him for an example earlier, he's an X Level character... No magic, he just punches stuff really hard and moves really fast. Figuring out that everyone else has to be way stronger than anyone in our world doesn't really affect that he's a character of X Level. I understand having a baseline is nice (even done it myself when world building for a story), but having to break apart the mechanics of why this has to work and figuring out how the culture would develop from it, along with what type of world (like incredibly hard surfaces) could produce/allow such lunacy, isn't super relevant to a character being Level X.

I have been working on a 3.X fighter fix as well as a way of porting the martial maneuvar system from Heart of Darkness to D&D, I suppose I could polish them up and post a copy as that seems to fit the bill.

I look forward to seeing this. Only heard about Heart of Darkness though, so no real experience with it myself.

Also, as has been said before, you should really check out Tome of Battle and Path of War if you haven't already. Heck, Exalted might also be a good source of inspiration.

Curious, which classes in those books would you say fits the closest to what I've said before? I intend to give them all a good read through at some point.

[Talakeal]

I look forward to seeing this. Only heard about Heart of Darkness though, so no real experience with it myself.

Its my own system, so I would be very surprised if you had any experience with it outside of one of my threads.

I put a lot of effort into making martial characters more dynamic and interesting to play than D&D martials, but it is still probably a bit low-key for your tastes as it definitely sticks to "guy at the gym" territory.

Curious, which classes in those books would you say fits the closest to what I've said before? I intend to give them all a good read through at some point.

I don't really know. I have personally not given the books a fair shake because I do not enjoy "fire and forget" abilities or those which contradict the established setting, but those don't seem to be a problem for a lot of people, and many people speak very highly of those books.

[AntiAuthority]

Its my own system, so I would be very surprised if you had any experience with it outside of one of my threads.

I put a lot of effort into making martial characters more dynamic and interesting to play than D&D martials, but it is still probably a bit low-key for your tastes as it definitely sticks to "guy at the gym" territory.

Well, seems me glancing at the title in your signature every now and then sort of put the title into my subconscious. That and I believe it got mixed together with World of Darkness when I was typing that out... Huh.

But any ideas are better than none, could use them as inspiration for something later/running a lower powered campaign for martial characters.

[Mechalich]

Ok, this is a tough one. I didn't do a very good job of explaining it before, I will try again.

Someone who becomes a "living legend" often has a survivor bias on their side, and you can model this in the game rules.

Although accounts are often exaggerated, Wild Bill was a real person in the real world who survived an inordinate number of gun fights. You can't get any more realism than this.

If you were trying to model one of Wild Bill's gunfights, you could go the traditional route of giving him a chance of being killed, because he could have died. But here's the thing, he didn't die in that battle. So you could also make a simulation where his death isn't a possibility. Both would be historically accurate, depending on how you look at it.

So it was "realistic" that Wild Bill survived a bunch of gun fights, because it really happened. Why would it be any less realistic for a fantasy fighter to survive a bunch of sword fights?

You just go into the game with the assumption that you are telling a narrative about heroes, not about random would be heroes who died and were forgotten. Would a hero die to a random stab from a goblin? Probably not. So you don't put the rules in the game, even though it theoretically could happen, just like you don't put rules in the game for tripping over your own feet and breaking your neck, or having a stroke mid adventure, or cutting yourself on your rusty spurs and dying of tetnis; even though those all could happen in the narrative, they are sufficiently unlikely that you don't bother putting in rules for them.

This is all controlling 'lethality' which is a general reference term for how deadly the rules make the game. Games have a very strong interest in reducing lethality that is in direct tension with the demands of verisimilitude in any game that involves a lot of combat, because combat is generally quite deadly. That said, lethality can be controlled without being too ridiculous, though the tools available do vary from setting to setting. Armor, notably, is a really good and reasonable way of controlling lethality, especially if the PCs generally have better armor (and better weapons too usually) than the people they oppose. Armor can even extend all the way up into personal forcefields or just being in a giant battlemech during combat in order to handle this issue.

Wild Bill, actually, is a case of a setting with some of the worst possible lethality baselines. 19th century firearms were extremely powerful and there were essentially no personal use protective technologies available to stop them, nor where there medical technologies to mitigate the long-term effects of infection, leading to the 'gut shot, you die,' scenario where you could take a wound that was lethal but not actually expire for days. Conflicts fought with such weapons technologies, ranging from the US Civil War to WWI were unbelievably lethal in a way early or later conflicts simply were not.

D&D, unfortunately, mostly handles lethality using hit points. This is convenient, but involves very substantial game abstractions that drastically reduce the verisimilitude of combat.

[Lemmy]

And the mythics tag sounds a lot like the extraordinary tag from Pathfinder... Ignoring Pathfinder has Mythic Tiers, but I mean the general idea is the same.

Not really. In practice, all that the (Ex) tag means is that the ability doesn't use magic... But it can be anything from "pile drive a titan" to "occasionally get a +1 to an attack roll". And morr importantly... It has mechanical implications.

The hypothetical [legendary/mythic/whatever] tag would have no mechanical effect in the game (and wouldn't be indicative of power either)... It'd simply be a quick way to let players know that said ability is of the wuxia/herculean/augmented-physics variety...

That way players who like that kind of stuff can use them without unbalacing the game and those who prefer 20th level martials to be "conan but with more hp" could simply say "No [mythic/ legendary /whatever] feats in this campaign!" and be done with it.

The tag would be purely a quick descriptor of the ability's flavor and visual. With absolutely no correlation to power or mechanics.

[Quertus]

Cool. I'll need some time to think about it.

Those are more than incorporeal / ethereal guardians, those are almost like living spheres of annihilation. Are they intentionally designed to be only vulnerable to magic? I don't see that written above, but it seems kind of like its implied, and if so that might not be a fair test anymore than replacing them with creatures that had spell immunity, projected an anti-magic field, and the tarrasque's reflective carapace.

I tried to describe them in a more system-agnostic manner. In D&D, they would be low damage, mid HP monsters, with mild low DC odd effects. So, kinda more like tough (high HP) ghosts, that give you "fatigued" (and spell failure) instead of "age 5 years" than living spheres of annihilation. They are not intentionally designed to be vulnerable only to magic. But, yes, in most systems, being "incorporeal" means that most things cannot hit you. And, in most systems, magic says "there's an app spell for that". In D&D, magic weapons (especially ghost touch weapons) are all but required to hit incorporeal creatures physically, and force effects are all but required to hit them magically; different systems will produce different results.

So, looking at this scenario - underwater extradimensional portal surrounded by invisible incorporeal guardians - what tools do your Martial characters bring to the table, compared to the magical characters that they've adventured with?

Or, for a more technologically advanced setting, the bridge had just been hit, and the party is blown out into the void of space. What tools do Martial characters from your games bring to that scenario, and how does that toolkit compare to that of their Magical companions?

[lesser_minion]

Alas, I'm well aware of this guideline and have railed against it many times before. It's useless for any kind of PvP comparison, it completely ignores optimization or even basic player skill, and it ignores itemization completely. Its only benefit other than starting forum arguments is for playgroups that aren't trying to use it as holy writ for class balance discussions.

Pretty much. If we assume that there are four level 8 PCs on the red team, and one CR8 monster on the blue team, the red team is supposed to expect to blow more than 20% of their limited resources -- mostly spells -- in order to defeat the blue team.

There's a general principle in wargames that e.g., four units in a fight with one similar units have a 16:1 advantage rather than a 4:1 advantage, all else being equal, because the four units have both quadruple the overall firepower and need four times more firepower to destroy.

Applying this rule of thumb gives us as a starting point that if each of red team's PCs is worth 100 points, red team as a whole is actually worth 1600 points, meaning that blue team needs to be worth something like 360 points.

Naturally, this is a starting point, and doesn't consider the red team's susceptibility to defeat in detail, but it's enough to cast a lot of doubt on level = CR.

[Cluedrew]

I've got some other stuff going on right now so I will not be making a big post, I may not until I have had time to read over Path of War and Spheres of Might. But there is one little thing I just had to address.

You only get XP for overcoming challenges. After a while, a commoner tilling his field is not overcoming any sort of challenge, he's just rolling a Profession check. That is why commoners don't hit 20th level (or even 10th level, or 5th!) even when they've been at it for decades.

What do you mean there are no challenges in farming? You are right from a rules perspective you are correct so this is D&D's mistake and not yours, but I feel that saying all of farming is trivial is both absurd and extremely unfair to the most important profession.

I guess the one on topic take away is XP should be considered "adventuring experience" and not something broader like "life experience".

[Max_Killjoy]

You only get XP for overcoming challenges. After a while, a commoner tilling his field is not overcoming any sort of challenge, he's just rolling a Profession check. That is why commoners don't hit 20th level (or even 10th level, or 5th!) even when they've been at it for decades.

Now if they're dealing with other sorts of challenges - orc raiders for instance, or natural disasters - that's a different story, but then the XP they're getting is based on the CR of those encounters, not the simple act of farming.

In 3.5, XP sort of exists in-universe since it's a resource that can be used for things like crafting and casting spells. In PF and 5e, it's purely a game construct that can even be dispensed with (and should, imo) in favor of story milestone leveling.

What does that have to do with whether they gain strength and endurance and resilience from a lifetime of daily physical labor? The work done by many people in such a setting is at least as strenuous a workout as anything that the adventurer is doing, and likely comes with less downtime, fewer breaks in the daily grind.

Alas, I'm well aware of this guideline and have railed against it many times before. It's useless for any kind of PvP comparison, it completely ignores optimization or even basic player skill, and it ignores itemization completely. Its only benefit other than starting forum arguments is for playgroups that aren't trying to use it as holy writ for class balance discussions.

All else being equal, two characters of the same level should have equivalent efficacy -- not identical, not interchangeable, equivalent. Call it power, call it impact, call it whatever.

The idea that taking 10 levels in Class X being significantly better or worse in terms of character efficacy than taking 10 levels in Class Y is somehow natural, normal, or acceptable, makes me really wonder what the heck is actually going on.

[Psyren]

Pretty much. If we assume that there are four level 8 PCs on the red team, and one CR8 monster on the blue team, the red team is supposed to expect to blow more than 20% of their limited resources -- mostly spells -- in order to defeat the blue team.

There's a general principle in wargames that e.g., four units in a fight with one similar units have a 16:1 advantage rather than a 4:1 advantage, all else being equal, because the four units have both quadruple the overall firepower and need four times more firepower to destroy.

Applying this rule of thumb gives us as a starting point that if each of red team's PCs is worth 100 points, red team as a whole is actually worth 1600 points, meaning that blue team needs to be worth something like 360 points.

Naturally, this is a starting point, and doesn't consider the red team's susceptibility to defeat in detail, but it's enough to cast a lot of doubt on level = CR.

Thanks - I just might bookmark your calculations here to reference next time someone brings up that "rule"

What do you mean there are no challenges in farming? You are right from a rules perspective you are correct so this is D&D's mistake and not yours, but I feel that saying all of farming is trivial is both absurd and extremely unfair to the most important profession.

I guess the one on topic take away is XP should be considered "adventuring experience" and not something broader like "life experience".

You're putting words in my mouth - I never once said "all of farming is trivial"; of course farming is a highly important activity for a society. But it does become routine; and challenges that grant XP change as you level, because the amount of XP you get from doing the same thing you've always done decreases over time, eventually to the point that the advancement you get out of it is either de minimis, or trickles in so slowly that it eventually gets offset by your age increasing.

This happens to adventurers too by the way, it's not unique to professions like farming. Think about something like soloing a whole army of low-level hobgoblins - a nigh-impossible feat for most low-level adventurers, and even mid-level ones would have trouble with it. But past a certain point, that same activity, or any on par with it challenge-wise, stops granting material benefits.

What does that have to do with whether they gain strength and endurance and resilience from a lifetime of daily physical labor? The work done by many people in such a setting is at least as strenuous a workout as anything that the adventurer is doing, and likely comes with less downtime, fewer breaks in the daily grind.

Well hold on now - are we talking about the abstraction of levels, or the abstraction of stats? Because the latter is a different issue entirely; you're asking for Elder Scrolls-style stat boosting when that's not how D&D works at all. A wizard can level by doing nothing but academic magic stuff and still put all their stat increases into strength despite never working out, or likewise a Barbarian can chop monsters up all day until eventually he becomes more charismatic. There is no required mechanical tie between the thing you do to level and the stats that increase because of it. (Though this is why I prefer 5e and Starfinder's stat increase method of letting you boost multiple scores at once.)

But let's put all that aside for a moment and get at the meat of your assumption - that the farmer who is growing stronger by farming is doing so by leveling to begin with. The biggest strength boost you'd experience from an activity like that would be the formative years of your teens to late 20s - becoming an adult, in other words. But these years typically happen before you're level 1 anyway - meaning this increase to the farmer's strength is already baked into their starting score. Soon after that, the stress this life puts on their bodies starts to show up - bad knees, bad back, illnesses and so on - and whatever gains they might receive from a life outdoors get offset, so at best they can just manage to keep the scores even, at least until age starts putting its finger on the scale and the downward spiral begins. Lastly, keep in mind also that peasant farmers in the medieval lifestyle D&D is based on had about half the life expectancy we enjoy today as well, and that muddies the waters even further.

Now, I'm not trying to claim D&D is anything close to a perfect or even a good simulation of real life stat increases - but my reading of it is that the starting score better encapsulates what you're after than leveling does.

[Talakeal]

Pretty much. If we assume that there are four level 8 PCs on the red team, and one CR8 monster on the blue team, the red team is supposed to expect to blow more than 20% of their limited resources -- mostly spells -- in order to defeat the blue team.

There's a general principle in wargames that e.g., four units in a fight with one similar units have a 16:1 advantage rather than a 4:1 advantage, all else being equal, because the four units have both quadruple the overall firepower and need four times more firepower to destroy.

Applying this rule of thumb gives us as a starting point that if each of red team's PCs is worth 100 points, red team as a whole is actually worth 1600 points, meaning that blue team needs to be worth something like 360 points.

Naturally, this is a starting point, and doesn't consider the red team's susceptibility to defeat in detail, but it's enough to cast a lot of doubt on level = CR.

Keep in mind that this assumes all damage is split evenly; if the outnumbered enemy focuses fire the other side's offensive power goes down accordingly.

Of course, that assumes that the outnumbered side survives long enough to take one of his opponent's out of the fight.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well hold on now - are we talking about the abstraction of levels, or the abstraction of stats? Because the latter is a different issue entirely; you're asking for Elder Scrolls-style stat boosting when that's not how D&D works at all. A wizard can level by doing nothing but academic magic stuff and still put all their stat increases into strength despite never working out, or likewise a Barbarian can chop monsters up all day until eventually he becomes more charismatic. There is no required mechanical tie between the thing you do to level and the stats that increase because of it. (Though this is why I prefer 5e and Starfinder's stat increase method of letting you boost multiple scores at once.)

But let's put all that aside for a moment and get at the meat of your assumption - that the farmer who is growing stronger by farming is doing so by leveling to begin with. The biggest strength boost you'd experience from an activity like that would be the formative years of your teens to late 20s - becoming an adult, in other words. But these years typically happen before you're level 1 anyway - meaning this increase to the farmer's strength is already baked into their starting score. Soon after that, the stress this life puts on their bodies starts to show up - bad knees, bad back, illnesses and so on - and whatever gains they might receive from a life outdoors get offset, so at best they can just manage to keep the scores even, at least until age starts putting its finger on the scale and the downward spiral begins. Lastly, keep in mind also that peasant farmers in the medieval lifestyle D&D is based on had about half the life expectancy we enjoy today as well, and that muddies the waters even further.

Now, I'm not trying to claim D&D is anything close to a perfect or even a good simulation of real life stat increases - but my reading of it is that the starting score better encapsulates what you're after than leveling does.

I'm not talking about leveling, or XP, or ASI -- they have nothing to do with my "assumption".

I'm talking about people who live by daily hard manual labor evidently being restricted to one set of limits, while people who engage in the "adventurer's" life of long stretches of moderate exertion punctuated by moments of extreme exertion and moments of little exertion, are free to blow past those limits to an entirely different scale.

[lesser_minion]

Keep in mind that this assumes all damage is split evenly; if the outnumbered enemy focuses fire the other side's offensive power goes down accordingly.

Of course, that assumes that the outnumbered side survives long enough to take one of his opponent's out of the fight.

Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind when I said "susceptible to defeat in detail".

Of course, if you want to build a team of dragon slayers, you could do a lot worse than to include a tactical genius who can help prevent that from happening, and you could certainly have a game where that character is a fighter.

Although depending on how we're dealing with the "guy at the library" problem, they could also reasonably be a wizard, I suppose.

[Quertus]

Pretty much. If we assume that there are four level 8 PCs on the red team, and one CR8 monster on the blue team, the red team is supposed to expect to blow more than 20% of their limited resources -- mostly spells -- in order to defeat the blue team.

There's a general principle in wargames that e.g., four units in a fight with one similar units have a 16:1 advantage rather than a 4:1 advantage, all else being equal, because the four units have both quadruple the overall firepower and need four times more firepower to destroy.

Applying this rule of thumb gives us as a starting point that if each of red team's PCs is worth 100 points, red team as a whole is actually worth 1600 points, meaning that blue team needs to be worth something like 360 points.

Naturally, this is a starting point, and doesn't consider the red team's susceptibility to defeat in detail, but it's enough to cast a lot of doubt on level = CR.

Keep in mind that this assumes all damage is split evenly; if the outnumbered enemy focuses fire the other side's offensive power goes down accordingly.

Of course, that assumes that the outnumbered side survives long enough to take one of his opponent's out of the fight.

If the 4-unit team still operates at full effectiveness until its "last HP" is lost, then… it could be worth 16x a single unit, sure. In most war games, the calculation of its effectiveness is much more complicated, and products a lower number - especially if AoE effects are a thing in the game.

[lesser_minion]

If the 4-unit team still operates at full effectiveness until its "last HP" is lost, then… it could be worth 16x a single unit, sure. In most war games, the calculation of its effectiveness is much more complicated, and products a lower number - especially if AoE effects are a thing in the game.

Yes. The four-man team is both four times more expensive to destroy, and four times more expensive to leave alone, but it's probably better to treat sixteen times better as an upper bound rather than an absolute truth.

That said, AoE could be a good way to make an offensively powerful "360 point" creature.

[Psyren]

I'm not talking about leveling, or XP, or ASI -- they have nothing to do with my "assumption".

I'm talking about people who live by daily hard manual labor evidently being restricted to one set of limits, while people who engage in the "adventurer's" life of long stretches of moderate exertion punctuated by moments of extreme exertion and moments of little exertion, are free to blow past those limits to an entirely different scale.

But even on the much smaller scale differentials of the real world this doesn't happen. Farmers don't farm their way into having the physique of Navy Seals or Olympic athletes; Why then should games like D&D model farming your way to being superhuman? I can at least see a tie between martial pursuits and this kind of advancement.

And incidentally, your latter category ("long stretches of moderate exertion punctuated by moments of extreme exertion and little exertion") describes pro athletes pretty well I'd say, because they tend to work towards relatively short tournaments or impactful games/exhibitions, punctuated by longer "off-seasons."

[Max_Killjoy]

But even on the much smaller scale differentials of the real world this doesn't happen. Farmers don't farm their way into having the physique of Navy Seals or Olympic athletes; Why then should games like D&D model farming your way to being superhuman? I can at least see a tie between martial pursuits and this kind of advancement.

We're not talking about modern farmers with machine "labor".

We're talking about farmers and other laborers in times and places parallel to the quasi-medievaloid settings of much fantasy including D&D's implicit setting. People who spent 8+ hours a day on hand manual labor for months on end, with maybe one day off a week.

And incidentally, your latter category ("long stretches of moderate exertion punctuated by moments of extreme exertion and little exertion") describes pro athletes pretty well I'd say, because they tend to work towards relatively short tournaments or impactful games/exhibitions, punctuated by longer "off-seasons."

Most modern athletes don't get much of an off-season, and their regular seasons (for pros) are grinds -- even NFL players spend more time "on" than "off". The athletes that stand out as having have highly punctuated schedules are boxers, MMA fighters, full contact martial artists, etc.