TNE: Nonmagical Fighter Idea Lab

[MGuy]

Your statement about going through and redoing everything in those books is exactly what I'm leaning on doing. (I have no idea why you think its more understandable now then when I mentioned doing it before but whatever) I would indeed like to take away the gross overpowering nature of magic and make it the worse choice if you want to copy another field's abilities while relegating its best abilities toward things that aren't necessary to be covered by other classes (high speed messaging, reading minds, etc). I want an update to 3.5 and I thought PF would do that. since it has not really given me what I wanted I want to then do it myself. So I hardly mind having to dive through the books and brew up some changes.

[Korwin]

Your statement about going through and redoing everything in those books is exactly what I'm leaning on doing.

Did you look at Fantasycraft?

[Judging__Eagle]

Let's look for mythological stories; and see how the "warriors" in them dealt with monsters or challenges that were high level?

Maybe that's a good place to start?

[RandomCasualty2]

Let's look for mythological stories; and see how the "warriors" in them dealt with monsters or challenges that were high level?

That just ends with the age old, "the balrog wasn't that high in level" and bullshit like that.

The problem is that when using the D&D scale of power, you're not going to be able to find any nonmagical high level warriors. Because everytime a warrior defeats anyone, people are just going to say he wasn't high level due to the simple fact that the warrior won.

[Parthenon]

Another problem is that some equivalent things, even ignoring time, need highly setting specific things.

So, lets say you want to bring someone back to life. You could make four different ways of doing it:

[*]Primal/Mystical: The barbarian/shaman goes into the nether world and fights Death to a standstill for a week until he gives up.
[*]Divine: The cleric/paladin goes on a week long trip to the gods of that person to intervene and ask for them to be raised.
[*]Arcane: The wizard spends a week in a ritual that raises them back up again.
[*]Sheer badassness: The fighter goes into one of the many holes into Hell, fighting off Cerberus and the demons of Hell, to go in and grab the dead soul, bringing them back to the surface. The journey takes about a week.

Each of these is pretty cool and badass. But they need a specific setting for this to work. Otherwise the fighter doesn't have a chance to do so.

[RandomCasualty2]

As for the main debate, I don't think doing something "like magic" has to necessarily be better in all respects, it just appears more fantastic.

If you wave your hand and create a castle with a 10 hour ritual, that's doing it like magic, but that ritual may well require more expensive components than the king who builds the castle on cheap peasant labor. So while doing it like magic is faster and makes you look awesome, it's also incredibly inefficient in terms of resource management. So now there's a tradeoff between doing something magically and not doing anything magically.

Charm spells I think should be some short duration, like a few hours and have the caveat that the charmed target becomes immune to future charm spells for a day afterwards. So anyone you charm will realize what you did after that period. Mundane social ability won't get nearly the same level of compliance, but it lasts pretty much permanently until you do something to make them not like you.

Magical stealth like invisibility is a mind affect. It doesn't work on things with a strong will (who can see through it) or mindless things whose minds cannot be clouded. Mundane stealth works well on things with low perception ability. Sneaking up on a wizard, you'd want mundane stealth. To sneak up on a a ranger, you'd likely want the magical kind.

And that's how the game should probably be set up. Magic is good for some things, and mundane skill use is better for others.

[Username17]

Let's look for mythological stories; and see how the "warriors" in them dealt with monsters or challenges that were high level?

Maybe that's a good place to start?

The reason that this is not a good place to start is because of the way that heroes defeat monsters in stories. The plot conspires to give them exactly what they need, no more and no less. Then they use those things to exactly defeat the enemy.

Perseus gets a set of winged boots that allow him to fly over the unsailable waters and he also gets a magic mirror shield that paralyzes the gorgon and then he lops her head off.

Vasilisa gets a magic doll that happens to know the answers to some arbitrary riddles and then she makes friends with two talking animals and an enchanted gate in Baba Yaga's house and then with the help of those four talking magic items and/or animals she solves three impossible tasks.

Prince Eric gets a magic shield of magic immunity and a magic sword of witch slaying and fairies show up to allow him to bypass three different impossible barriers so that he can have a show down with his nemesis.

Prince Ivan marries his sisters off to three different talking birds and they show up with magic potions that Ivan combines into a rube goldberg mechanism that slays Koschei the Deathless so he can rescue his own wife (who happens to be an army slaying sorceress in her own right).

---

This is not a workable model. At all. People who don't have magic have no real control over their character. Magic people show up and give them bottled spells that they presumably use at the right time to save the day. But they don't do anything or have any abilities save possibly for "Is Facebook Friends with magic dudes whose abilities actually matter."

-Username17

[K]

And the thing is, the more abilities you have, the less having more abilities matters compared to having better abilities. Difficulties and obstacles in a role playing game should generally not be in the format "Blue Key [Y/N]?" but rather ones in which you can use many different abilities to push through to victory. And at that point, having at least one appropriate ability becomes more likely the more of them you have, and having better abilities is still having better abilities. No matter how many ways a non magical guy can work for an hour to solve a problem, if the Wizard can solve it instantly with flawless telepathy then the Wizard is still better.

Frankly, Aragorn busts out magic every single time he wants to do anything big. And that should be the model. As you become more bad ass, you get more abilities and you also get more magic abilities that are totally hard core. And if you have enough magical abilities, you're a Wizard. And that's why whenever a character in a Grimm tale runs into "a Wizard" that just means "a dude who is very high level."

-Username17

You do know that people use action movies as the model of "non-magical awesome". Cops get mastermind ax killers to confess in under 2 mins. They survive nuclear blasts by getting into refrigerators. They use handguns to shoot people hundreds of yards away while not getting hit by the dozen gunmen shooting at them from from close range. They pull Thomas Crown type misdirection. You know, impossible stuff.

You have have non-magical feeling things that are as good or better than things that feel like magic without going the route of 4e where every ability is a damage roll with some flavor text. This is not an insolvable problem.

And I'm fine if some things are explicitly and always magic. If making walls of stone come out of the ground is something you want to be always magical that's fine, as long as you keep something like convincing someone to help you nonmagical and the only other form of mind control in your game is automaton-like dominate (Shadowrun does this, for example).

3e failed in that made everything the fighter could do not as good as the wizard. 4e failed in that it gave nothing to anyone. Earthdawn failed because it couldn't understand that there are people who love fantasy and only want to be King Arthur, Conan, or Frodo.... people who living in worlds of magic, have magic items, but aren't Gandalf, Harry Potter, or some other magic guy.

And sure, some DMs will naturally favor the magic guy. I don't see that as a problem because every DM favors something. Some make every elf a badass and make every mind flayer a genius who counters the players plans before they even make them.... I mean, there is no way to write out the bad DM without going 4e and just playing a persistant boardgame.

This can be done. We have the model and know the pitfalls. The only reason to not even try it is because either we are too afraid we might fail or because we have no respect for the fantasy tradition and the characters people want to play from the tradition.

[Username17]

You do know that people use action movies as the model of "non-magical awesome". Cops get mastermind ax killers to confess in under 2 mins. They survive nuclear blasts by getting into refrigerators. They use handguns to shoot people hundreds of yards away while not getting hit by the dozen gunmen shooting at them from from close range. They pull Thomas Crown type misdirection. You know, impossible stuff.

Yes. This stuff happens in movies and stories and even role playing games. And we know it's not a workable model. Because people fucking hate it. They rebel. They won't do it.

If the guy who makes glowing runes shows up and makes some glowing forcefield and the nuke bomb goes off and he's still standing, that's fine. On the other hand, if some guy climbs into a fridge and survives the nuke blast, people quit the game. It still isn't as good, because the runes guy takes zero time and can do it while standing in the middle of a featureless plain. But the guy in the fridge will ruin everyone's enjoyment of the game. Seriously.

A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator. The film is widely recognised by fans as a major departure from the rest of the series both in terms of content and quality.

It's not a viable solution. Not because people can't write that kind of material, but because they don't want to.

-Username17

[imperialspectre]

What if utility magic only provided numerical bonuses to d20 rolls? So Invisibility isn't "you're invisible, if someone already knows you're there they're at a -20 to Spot anyway," it's "your form becomes translucent and you get a +X bonus per Y CL to Hide checks." That way, the Wizard has to invest in Hide or stick to sneaking past dumb mooks, and we can easily fluff up a similar bonus that the Rogue or Ranger can access without necessarily calling it a "spell."

[Username17]

What if utility magic only provided numerical bonuses to d20 rolls?

Then it would be 4e Utility Powers?

What's the numeric bonus to a d20 roll provided by a telepathic communique? What's the numeric bonus to a d20 roll provided by creating a wall of sand or freezing water?

-Username17

[K]

You do know that people use action movies as the model of "non-magical awesome". Cops get mastermind ax killers to confess in under 2 mins. They survive nuclear blasts by getting into refrigerators. They use handguns to shoot people hundreds of yards away while not getting hit by the dozen gunmen shooting at them from from close range. They pull Thomas Crown type misdirection. You know, impossible stuff.

Yes. This stuff happens in movies and stories and even role playing games. And we know it's not a workable model. Because people fucking hate it. They rebel. They won't do it.

If the guy who makes glowing runes shows up and makes some glowing forcefield and the nuke bomb goes off and he's still standing, that's fine. On the other hand, if some guy climbs into a fridge and survives the nuke blast, people quit the game. It still isn't as good, because the runes guy takes zero time and can do it while standing in the middle of a featureless plain. But the guy in the fridge will ruin everyone's enjoyment of the game. Seriously.

They only rebel if it doesn't fit with the rest the action. Indiana Jones is a low-action franchise where the hero shoots the whip guy instead of having an iconic sword vs whip fight, so to suddenly shift gears makes people unhappy.

Put the same scene in a high action movie, and no one will bat an eye.

I mean, how many DnD adventures have you had people want to do crazy stuff like jump on a dragon's back like Madmardigan in Willow and have the system let them down? People get upset when DM fiat lets you do those things, but they don't get upset when your actual class features let you do it.

3e made several inroads toward this model. Frenzied Beserkers who can't die... fine with that. Assasins who can one-shot anything in the game not already immune to death.... a-ok. Rogues who can take no damage from explosions, an actual "surviving a nuke in a fridge" ability called Improved Evasion..... no one even mentioned it.

I know it can be done because it has been done. 3e was an experiment in lots of different models of power, and now we know what works and what doesn't.

[Username17]

Rogues who can take no damage from explosions, an actual "surviving a nuke in a fridge" ability called Improved Evasion..... no one even mentioned it.

I know you've been hiding in Bakersfield for a while, but seriously? You don't remember the hundreds and hundreds of people complaining about Evasion and how "unrealistic" it was to be able to dodge fireballs in confined spaces? That ability doesn't even matter and isn't even very big (since fireballs are weak sauce and small potatoes so dodging them isn't a major change to the game space), but people flip out.

But that's not even the point. The point is that you're never ever going to get action parity between magic and non-magic. You are never ever going to do that. It's offensive that you are even making the argument that it is desirable or even possible. Even in bad ass action movies, you have to stretch and cajole to get every step of awesome out of non-magical actions, and you have to clearly state hard rules to limit the awesomeness of magic to keep it from coming in and taking over everything.

You have viable choices: severely limit magic until it is indistinguishable from science ("any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science"), or give everyone magic, or most likely both. Throwing up your hands and saying that the physics engine itself should support people without physics defying powers defying physics is recursive definition failure.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Frank people are gonna rebel against anything and everything. There's no way in this reality that you can make anything that people will all like. You say "no one" wants what we're talking about in the face of, we the people who want it. I can name (at least) one person in every group I've run D&D for who didn't want magic powers. And I know you have met people like that. They are the kind of people who say, I wanna be a fighter.

If everyone who plays whatever game wants magic, guess what, they will choose a magical character. Believe it or not there are people who play the game who want to nothing more than to fight everything. Hell I've had 2 different people who played long term games wanting to do nothing with magic other than blow shit up despite me telling them there are better ways to use it. Hell I've had people who thought the Missile Mage PrC out of the Dragon Mag Compendium was a good idea.

Moreover if people can wrap their minds around magic it is not that much more of a stretch for them to wrap their minds around people doing awesome things like hiding in a fridge during a nuke. The last person I brought that up to had just started playing the game. You know what he said to me?

"How is it hard to believe in evasion when you have these assholes in robes who can pull a rabbit out of their ass because its Tuesday?"

So why is it so bad that the OPTION exists?

[K]

Rogues who can take no damage from explosions, an actual "surviving a nuke in a fridge" ability called Improved Evasion..... no one even mentioned it.

I know you've been hiding in Bakersfield for a while, but seriously? You don't remember the hundreds and hundreds of people complaining about Evasion and how "unrealistic" it was to be able to dodge fireballs in confined spaces? That ability doesn't even matter and isn't even very big (since fireballs are weak sauce and small potatoes so dodging them isn't a major change to the game space), but people flip out.

Yeh, seriously. The fact that some people in the "Fighters can't have nice things" camp flipped out over Improved Evasion during year 1 of 3e just means that it was a revolutionary idea. On year 7, no one even cared. Not one bit.

When people recount all the things that break their 3e game, Improved Evasion doesn't even make the list. And it's just one of many non-magical feeling things in 3e that actually are level appropriate for characters to do.

The fact that we are going abstract positioning and reining in the crazy on magic actually makes making level-appropriate nonmagical stuff a lot easier to swallow. I mean rather than having people complain that it is not simulationist for a rogue to move the required 30 ft to dodge a fireball, under the abstract positioning system you can just say "he anticipates potential fireballs and always positions himself close to cover."

Action movies have to stretch only because they have to show all the actions. We can have high action and gloss over the details that would cause someone to cry fowl.

Like I said, 3e has mountains of crazy stuff with a nonmagical flavor and people are fine with that. It can and has been done successfully. The only disconnect is yours.

[Username17]

Yeh, seriously. The fact that some people in the "Fighters can't have nice things" camp flipped out over Improved Evasion during year 1 of 3e just means that it was a revolutionary idea. On year 7, no one even cared. Not one bit.

No. People still cared. People still ranted. You just stopped paying attention because you stopped caring about those people. But here's the thing: the people who want there to be "non magical heroes" are the same people who kick up shit about Evasion "feeling magical." If you go in heavily for non-magical character support, those assholes you stopped paying attention to five years ago are your intended audience.

Action movies have to stretch only because they have to show all the actions. We can have high action and gloss over the details that would cause someone to cry fowl.

Action movies don't even let non-magical people win or accomplish anything. The Mummy ends because people use magic to win. The main character is basically just there as a distraction so that mages can read books and win the day. Willow ends because the heroes are protected from Bavmorda's magic, allowing them to fight her at all without being ice statues. The source material just doesn't support people being able to do anything against magic types except go to other magic types and get buffs an/or exposition required to turn off the auto-win magic. It's not just all the books and legends, it's also all the movies.

Magic vs. non-Magic is a god damned Riddle and you only win because the DM gave you arbitrary magic bullshit and puzzles that let you win. Or you don't guess the number the DM was thinking and you lose hard. People with swords and no magic do not win against the sorcerer king.

Like I said, 3e has mountains of crazy stuff with a nonmagical flavor and people are fine with that. It can and has been done successfully.

One: the purists who actually want non-magic as a flavor are not fine with it.
Two: it still isn't enough. If you don't have "a counter spell" you can't even fight Bavmorda. If you don't have "a banishment spell" you can't even end a fight against Imhotep.

Even if you dropped D&D magic tremendously, there just isn't any source material anywhere to draw upon where not using magic is a viable life choice against magic enemies. The closest you got is characters who don't have any magic but happen to get the aid of sorcerers an artifacts repeatedly throughout their career.

And that's bullshit. That's the "I don't use magic, I just expect the DM to bail my ass out of problems over and over again" plan. It's like being BA in The A Team. Your refusal to use magic means exactly as much as his refusal to use airplanes does. The fucking adventure is one air flight away, so your character is going to have to be kidnapped every fucking episode an taken to the adventure. The adventure requires magic to solve, so you're going to have to find a frickin artifact every adventure.

Fuck. That.

-Username17

[virgil]

In several of the Conan stories I read, he never had magic bail him out or someone with magic bail him out. It was actually a matter of him just stabbing things in the face and resisting/dodging the spell. Twice out of the half dozen I've read, particularly powerful magic is obtained and is countered by it requiring too much concentration to bring full force on Conan (backstabbing minion or a demon that eats the summoner for daring to command it).

[Sunwitch]

I don't recall there being particularly powerful magic in Conan in the first place, which is why he was capable of standing up against it. In a universe where magic is something that's actually really powerful and "mundanes" of the same supposed level of power are expected to stand up against them on equal ground, those "mundanes" need power equivalent to the magic guys.

And if this means them doing things that are only nominally mundane, like jumping over mountains or walking on air or crashing right through walls of force or being able to endure mind-numbing physical injury and keep going just because they are that awesome, that's likely to offend the people who want all that "mundane" stuff in the first place. And really, I don't see why anyone should care, since those people who want one group of characters to be capable of bending reality while the other guys are stuck in realism-land and for them all to be actually balanced are asking for something that is entirely impossible.

[Thymos]

Oh, I remember a Conan story where he get's locked in a dungeon by a mage and it takes another mage who he frees to get him out of there.

Then when he lops off the head of the guy who trapped him it doesn't kill him, and the mage he saved then flew off with the other guys head (he was his rival).

Frank I think the only way to please everyone is to split the game into tiers.

We can have the normal tier where mages and everyone are playing on equal ground.

Then we throw in the heroic tier, mages are started to get better, warriors abilities are starting to become more magical.

By the time we hit epic then mages and fighters should both be using the same amount of magic, or at least the fighter's superhuman feats should be powered by magic even if they aren't spells.

This is if people still want DnD style magic. I personally think DnD style magic reeks more of putting plot devices in the game than anything else.

[TavishArtair]

I don't recall there being particularly powerful magic in Conan in the first place, which is why he was capable of standing up against it. In a universe where magic is something that's actually really powerful and "mundanes" of the same supposed level of power are expected to stand up against them on equal ground, those "mundanes" need power equivalent to the magic guys.

There was always immensely powerful magic in the Conan series. He generally stopped it by going to the wizard and stabbing him in the face, and he only succeeded at that because a sword was quicker than magic. In one case he encountered a godlike being and the only reason he survived was because it didn't care enough to kill him, being too cosmic for that. Otherwise, wizards expressly had the ability to do stuff like cast hold person and then kick you off a high tower, Conan just always acted first and his action was the more lethal one.

[Username17]

I would be totally fine with a tiered system in which characters with magic at the lower tiers had such limitations on the scope of their magic that they adventured along side people who had no magic at all without that being weird. As long as people understand that at higher tiers everyone has magic of on sort or another no matter what their character type or backstory, it's all good in the hood.

You can be in a party with The Beastmaster even if you don't have any magic. But you can't be in a party with Sauron if you don't have any magic.

For example: in Black Forest, characters in the child hero tier may very well not have any magic. And what magic they do have is going to be things like "understand the speech of birds" or "cut yourself to make an apple grow before your eyes." And while it's impressive in its way, it's as weird and out of the box as all the other child abilities like disease resistance, fastidiousness, or climbing. At higher tiers when you're fighting monsters that cannot be slain by fire or steel as a normal thing, you're all going to have access to real magic.

-Username17

[MGuy]

So you want a generic hero system where you pick and choose your abilities as you go higher in tier? Aren't there systems that already do that kind of thing?

[Sunwitch]

I don't recall there being particularly powerful magic in Conan in the first place, which is why he was capable of standing up against it. In a universe where magic is something that's actually really powerful and "mundanes" of the same supposed level of power are expected to stand up against them on equal ground, those "mundanes" need power equivalent to the magic guys.

There was always immensely powerful magic in the Conan series. He generally stopped it by going to the wizard and stabbing him in the face, and he only succeeded at that because a sword was quicker than magic.

So basically, he was just lucky enough to win initiative over and over while on a playing field that he could charge or otherwise move up to and one-shot a guy on. In D&D terms. Or something. Admittedly I never read much Conan so I'm speaking mostly from hearsay here, but at least I can surmise that they never had anything like, say, Contingency.

But yeah, I agree with the notion that there should be different tiers of power for different kinds of games. Heck, if there were some kind of similar system defined for 3.5, a lot of design decisions would have been made differently and overall we would probably have a better game. Much like if they'd bothered actually following the CR guidelines they put together.

I'm not so sure you have to define high-level stuff explicitly as magic. As an example, guys in anime and anime-styled video games are known to make their swords shoot vacuum blades or whatever just because they are really awesome and with absolutely no "magical" context at all. That might not be everyone's cup of tea, but there are plenty of examples of guys like Beowulf and Cuchulainn doing totally inhuman stuff in western fantasy just because that's how cool they are. Even that contradicts the "traditional western fantasy" that a lot of people are after (where "traditional western fantasy" is explicitly defined as "Lord of the Rings"), so these people are pretty much bound to playing a lower tier game.

The whole "mundane" versus "magic" thing strikes me as a debate over fluff; in the end the only thing that matters is they're getting abilities that are equivalent in power and utility. Sense Motive and Discern Lies/Detect Thoughts are certainly not equivalent in power and utility.

[Kaelik]

Well, mostly it's just like those Wizards could cast hold person with a casting time of one minute.

AKA, not powerful magic.

You'll notice none of them ever walk around with invisibility or polymorph or mirror image active for much of the time.

None of them can cast any spell in less than a minute.

Hold Person with a 1 minute casting time is pretty shitty, because it basically allows you to paralyze someone who is already tied up.

[Grek]

It shouldn't be too hard to make a set of rules that has non-magical fighters and people who can do magic doing stuff in the same story. All you need is a mundane way to interact with and beat magical effects that isn't "die horribly".

Example 1: Iron.

It alot of stories, things made out of iron make magic stop working or not effect whoever has the iron. Iron is easy to get and something that your fighter is already going to have. Saying that wearing iron armour and having iron weapons lets you resist some sorts of magic, like magical paralysis, sleep and death effects means that the fighter can go mano-e-mano with the wizards and stab them while they try less deadly effects that aren't stopped by the iron, like summoning fire.

Example 2: Salt.
Likewise, in many stories, salt is a mundane object which has effects on magical stuff. Sprinkling a line of salt would block ethereal people, make invisible people visible and burn the undead. The fighter can just carry a bag of salt with him and use it as needed, just like the wizard carries a pile of scrolls and magic powders.

Example 3: Garlic.
In a setting where commonly found plants and herbs mess around with how magic works, people will wear strings of plants around their neck when they go fight monsters. If it also happens that these magical protections fail if you are doing magic or make your own magic weaker, than you can choose between magicing people but being weak to magic or not magicing people being super magic resistant.