Weaning people off of the Martial power source.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So Fighter should have:

*Crazy HP
*Immunity to being Coup De Grace
*Regen?
*Super strength
*Dance on spears?

And that is exactly why the Martial source should just fuck off and die after the 1/4th mark of the game.

[K]

Even the whitewashed versions give Gawain the ability to more or less hulk out and probably bash down castles if he wants when the sun is up. And come on, the Ulster Cycle? Cuchulainn's warp frenzy is so explosive that he has to wear a special tunic when he uses it or he will literally burst into parts all over the place. He then kills a few hundred dudes and dances on the tips of spears.

Yeh, but that would look stupid in a live-action movie which is why no one wants it in their DnD.

Seriously. The criteria for the martial source is "anything that would not look stupid if Val Kilmer was doing it." So yes on Willow-style action, and no on Batman and Robin-style action. Stabbing a dragon in the face so hard its head explodes is OK, but no on anything with rubber nipples.

Its not hard to live within those limitations and do really amazing crap, but you need to set magic at that limit too. This means that bouncing Finger of Death rays off your sword needs to be built into the system and something only a trained warrior would even try (like deflecting arrows with a melee weapon, which is very hard, but possible).

[TavishArtair]

Well, OK. That pretty much places magic and Val Kilmer on even footing, more or less. I will grant you that when you combine the two premises (that action heroes are the ideal, and that magic shall ne'er surpass them) that your game works just fine, and you can generate a fine version of D&D on that.

Will it be the D&D that everyone wants? Well, no, but no other version of D&D will be that either. Hopefully you can at least write it more interestingly than 4e, which is kind of like the utter failure version of those premises.

[Username17]

The problem is that even Val Kilmer can't fight magic users without having another magic user dispel the major battlefield spells for him. The evil sorceress can turn an entire castle into a icy death trap that automatically freezes everyone solid, and Val Kilmer can only even fight her because another wizard is on hand to poke a hole in it. There's literally nothing he can do to oppose a major caster if they can use all their stuff. Willow is a cool movie, but it embraces the "Wizards > You" paradigm pretty hard. It's not a viable system if you don't want the Wizard players to routinely piss in the cheerios of the fighters.

If you want to limit fighters to the level of Val Kilmer, the evil wizards need to be brought down to the level of Warwick Davis. And we're talking the amateur wizard in Willow Davis, not Leprechaun Davis. You can't have Bavmordas or Fin Raziels in such a setup, because they are clearly much more powerful than Val Kilmer, and if Val Kilmer is the high end of what a martial power source character can do, that's the end of that. In short: to even do Willow you have to accept that either warriors get way more powerful than Martigan is in the movie, or you have to have warriors of Martigan's ability stop being warriors and start being "Magic" in the Sauron style of giant armored magic warrior. Those are literally your only two options if you want to use Willow as a template for anything.

And yeah, the old school Robin Hood Songs were just that: songs. There are like hundreds of those things, and a lot of them are filled with hyperbole and over the top crazy antics. They are basically the Looney Tunes of their day, and main characters are constantly surviving stupidly fatal things and one-upping each other by doing comically impossible acts. Robin Hood == Bugs Bunny. With a sword, a staff, and a bow.

-Username17

[Username17]

I'm not even kidding. Here is the relevant section of Willow.

Val Kilmer kills a dragon. It's very dramatic. Also, Bavmorda turns fucking everyone into pigs, Val Kilmer included, as a joke. Only people with spell-based protection are able to continue the adventure. Full fucking stop.

This is not an acceptable template for a role playing game in which one or more player characters are expected to go their whole adventuring careers without ever learning any spells.

-Username17

[Archmage]

This is not an acceptable template for a role playing game in which one or more player characters are expected to go their whole adventuring careers without ever learning any spells.

I remember reading a D&D supplement for casters (3.0 Tome and Blood, maybe?) that had a brief section talking about campaigns with all-arcane spellcaster parties. The basic gist, as I remember it, was that an all caster party would be very interesting and that it had the "potential" to be very powerful, but that they'd be sorely lacking if they didn't have at least one martial type around and that healing might be a problem.

Yeah, right.

[Judging__Eagle]

When you have three characters that can spam Expeditious Retreat, and Colour Spray; it doesn't matter if there's no one else in the party.

You just win.

The CS spam happened during a fight in my 1st 3.5 campaign, no one noticed that it was a tactic made of pure win, not even me.

Martial characters need to have their skills be equivalent to spells; and that's really it.

If Intimidate can cower enemies at all, that's good.

If Bluff can blind/daze/stun/your mum enemies, that's also good.

Jump, Climb, Balance should be useful in dealing with big stuff, like Dragons.

Hide needs to have more in-combat use, and needs to be used more often in combat.

I think that the tools needed to do things exist, it's just that the skills aren't given the powerups that they need.

When you intimidate something, there's no benefit for beating them by X amount.

When you Jump, your check tells you how far you jumped, up or across. That's a good thing.

So, Intimidate, and Jump need to be more alike.


Also, I'm very much in Favour of making Concentration a skill everyone can buy. As well as having Concentration be the fuck your magic skill.

Mostly since it's the only thing that remotely fits into the idea of "fuck your magic", and really, that's what you see many fighters try to do when affected by a spell. Even if a Petrification hits them, or they have an arm blown off by a Disintegrate, they try to grit their teeth and kill the enemy caster before they are truly incapacitated.

Of course, I'm wish that saving throws were on a gradient of some kind.

[K]

I'm not even kidding. Here is the relevant section of Willow.

Val Kilmer kills a dragon. It's very dramatic. Also, Bavmorda turns fucking everyone into pigs, Val Kilmer included, as a joke. Only people with spell-based protection are able to continue the adventure. Full fucking stop.

This is not an acceptable template for a role playing game in which one or more player characters are expected to go their whole adventuring careers without ever learning any spells.

-Username17

Sure it is. Madmardigan has Leadership and the old woman mage he drags around is his class feature. That's why he is the leader of the army.

Bavmorda turning the army into pigs is just the DM giving him a chance to use one of his class features. Its not like she's any help in the final battle.

[Username17]

I'm not even kidding. Here is the relevant section of Willow.

Val Kilmer kills a dragon. It's very dramatic. Also, Bavmorda turns fucking everyone into pigs, Val Kilmer included, as a joke. Only people with spell-based protection are able to continue the adventure. Full fucking stop.

This is not an acceptable template for a role playing game in which one or more player characters are expected to go their whole adventuring careers without ever learning any spells.

-Username17

Sure it is. Madmardigan has Leadership and the old woman mage he drags around is his class feature. That's why he is the leader of the army.

Bavmorda turning the army into pigs is just the DM giving him a chance to use one of his class features. Its not like she's any help in the final battle.

Sigh. It's totally obvious that you haven't watched that movie since you were ten, so I won't jump all over you here.

Try watching the actual final battle in that movie. Val Kilmer is basically totally uninvolved in the final battle, Fin Raziels does all the heavy lifting, and when she is finally defeated it is because she is so surprised at one of Willow's slight of hand tricks that she catches herself in her own doom bolt and dies.

Val Kilmer gets to murder General Kael, Bavmorda's cohort. Sorsha gets telekineticized out of the battle altogether, and if Raziel wasn't there to save her with magic she would have been death-no-saved on top of that. Raziel gets to have the actual sorcerous duel with Bavmorda that actually hurts her. Willow gets to pull his last bit of Arcane Trickster mojo to actually take her down.

But do you see the pattern? Actual sword guys are under no circumstances allowed to accomplish absolutely anything against the actual major spellcasters in there. Martigan's actual accomplishments are confined to killing monsters and stooges. Old women who know any magic at all are so far above him that he is not even allowed into the same room.

-Username17

[K]

I'm not even kidding. Here is the relevant section of Willow.

Val Kilmer kills a dragon. It's very dramatic. Also, Bavmorda turns fucking everyone into pigs, Val Kilmer included, as a joke. Only people with spell-based protection are able to continue the adventure. Full fucking stop.

This is not an acceptable template for a role playing game in which one or more player characters are expected to go their whole adventuring careers without ever learning any spells.

-Username17

Sure it is. Madmardigan has Leadership and the old woman mage he drags around is his class feature. That's why he is the leader of the army.

Bavmorda turning the army into pigs is just the DM giving him a chance to use one of his class features. Its not like she's any help in the final battle.

Sigh. It's totally obvious that you haven't watched that movie since you were ten, so I won't jump all over you here.

Try watching the actual final battle in that movie. Val Kilmer is basically totally uninvolved in the final battle, Fin Raziels does all the heavy lifting, and when she is finally defeated it is because she is so surprised at one of Willow's slight of hand tricks that she catches herself in her own doom bolt and dies.

Val Kilmer gets to murder General Kael, Bavmorda's cohort. Sorsha gets telekineticized out of the battle altogether, and if Raziel wasn't there to save her with magic she would have been death-no-saved on top of that. Raziel gets to have the actual sorcerous duel with Bavmorda that actually hurts her. Willow gets to pull his last bit of Arcane Trickster mojo to actually take her down.

But do you see the pattern? Actual sword guys are under no circumstances allowed to accomplish absolutely anything against the actual major spellcasters in there. Martigan's actual accomplishments are confined to killing monsters and stooges. Old women who know any magic at all are so far above him that he is not even allowed into the same room.

-Username17

I do recall the movie.

The final twenty minutes of the movie is basically everyone being reminded that Bavmorda is a much higher level character than any of the heroes individually which is why no one has offed her until now. She's a puzzle monster, and only Willow figures out her weakness (will saves, as far as I can tell). The old woman who fought her was basically a distraction for a few minutes while Madmardigan destroyed her army..... it's not like she was so wounded that someone else got to stab her or so tired she couldn't cast more spells or anything. The actual killing of Bavmorda is basically DM fiat since once her armies are destroyed she ceases to be a credible BBEG except on a personal level.

The other 70 minutes of the movie are Madmardigan and Willow fighting level-appropriate challenges.

Both Conan movies end the same way with the "magic guy who is much more powerful" being killed in some cheap way. They don't end in any "fair fight" where they exchange blows until the winner gets the killing blow (for that, see the second Conan movie where he fights the Wizard in the crystal tower in the middle of the movie, or Red Sonja).

[Username17]

The final twenty minutes of the movie is basically everyone being reminded that Bavmorda is a much higher level character than any of the heroes individually which is why no one has offed her until now.

Exactly.

Bavmorda is higher level than Raziel, Raziel is higher level than Willow or Val Kilmer, and they are higher level than Sorsha.

But while we can easily see that Sorsha could become a higher level character just by increasing the amount of ass she can kick in sword fights to the capabilities of Martigan or Kael, none of those three can get to the level of Raziel without getting some frickin spellcasting. Because without spellcasting, Raziel can turn your entire party into stone, and Bavmorda can turn your party and your entire army into swine.

You roll initiative, the spellcasters don't even care what the number is because they have a segment 12 non-action that paralyzes all the enemies. High level spellcasters can eliminate plot devices worth of fighters, even ones as tough as Val Kilmer, as a frickin Presence Attack. And the only presented counter is "have magic."

Which means that in this model, when Val Kilmer goes up in level he needs to learn protection spells and remove curse, because that's obviously the only way a character could possibly compete in the high level environment beyond Willow. Willow presents an upper bound for the level that Martial Power Sourced characters can have, and clearly indicates that levels go past that for Arcane power source characters.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

I think this is somewhat over-analyzing the model proposed. While the point that only magic-users get to really play ball in the movie is a fair one, we can draw on other sources than just Willow. Maybe alloy it with a little Conan and make it so that fighter-types have Get In The First Punch on their ability list. Presumably they also are Mage Slayers or something, I don't know.

The main thing is that there is Action Hero Fantasy, and there is Epic Hero Fantasy. In Action Hero Fantasy you still get to punch a dragon so hard it explodes, but in Epic Hero Fantasy you are allowed to put your head back on your shoulders after it is lopped off, probably with an annoyed look on it. Likewise if you're an Action Wizard your magic probably caps out at something like Death Ray, but is more like Meteor Storm for an Epic Wizard.

The more important thing though is that these aren't just two different power levels, they are in fact entirely different settings and while we can write both, we can't write both in the same books or we will have an abomination like D&D occur where Action Heroes are outclassed by Epic Wizards and people will probably forget that Action Wizards or Epic Heroes exist, because they'd rather fighters get bent over by magic wang all day.

[K]

The final twenty minutes of the movie is basically everyone being reminded that Bavmorda is a much higher level character than any of the heroes individually which is why no one has offed her until now.

Exactly.

Bavmorda is higher level than Raziel, Raziel is higher level than Willow or Val Kilmer, and they are higher level than Sorsha.

But while we can easily see that Sorsha could become a higher level character just by increasing the amount of ass she can kick in sword fights to the capabilities of Martigan or Kael, none of those three can get to the level of Raziel without getting some frickin spellcasting. Because without spellcasting, Raziel can turn your entire party into stone, and Bavmorda can turn your party and your entire army into swine.

You roll initiative, the spellcasters don't even care what the number is because they have a segment 12 non-action that paralyzes all the enemies. High level spellcasters can eliminate plot devices worth of fighters, even ones as tough as Val Kilmer, as a frickin Presence Attack. And the only presented counter is "have magic."

Which means that in this model, when Val Kilmer goes up in level he needs to learn protection spells and remove curse, because that's obviously the only way a character could possibly compete in the high level environment beyond Willow. Willow presents an upper bound for the level that Martial Power Sourced characters can have, and clearly indicates that levels go past that for Arcane power source characters.

-Username17

The DnD answer has always been: "and then the fighter gets a magic item."

I hate to break it to you, but that's what people want. They really do.

Fighters ride dragons, they don't cast Fly. They have amulets that protect them from curses, they don't cast remove curse. At the high end they end up with the Sword of Thundara and shoot laser beams at people, but at no point do they shoot them from their hands, and they do it while advancing their fighting skills.

Its thematic. It doesn't matter how a character gets their power as long they compete with their enemies.

DnD of the last 15 years has been dominated by the CRPG "loot whores" who want equal numbers of magic items for everyone even if they are a wizard who doesn't need them, but if we look at the fiction that starts with Conan and ends with Wheel of Time, we'll see that warrior guys get all the good magic items. Jack Vance's heroes run through magic items like they came out of a dollar store and even Mat from WoT ends up with an amulet that basically makes him immune to magic which lets him play in the same world as Rand who can blow up entire armies.

Although it completely breaks with DnD tradition, the sad fact is that characters should be paying class features to use magic items as powerful as class features. Anything else is unbalanced on first principles.

[God_of_Awesome]

I constantly suggest anime and I'll keep doing so. Flash stepping, hefting sword bigger then YOU, run on water, air slashes, magic sword as class feature, take massive wounds and keep on truckin, killer aura that constantly Cause Fear as spell, run on walls, jump STORIES, deflect laser beams, using dental floss as a deadly weapon, throw sword like boomerang, like spear, ignore magic defences, gun-kata with crossbows.

Oh, and make them optional for customization goodness.

[K]

I constantly suggest anime and I'll keep doing so. Flash stepping, hefting sword bigger then YOU, run on water, air slashes, magic sword as class feature, take massive wounds and keep on truckin, killer aura that constantly Cause Fear as spell, run on walls, jump STORIES, deflect laser beams, using dental floss as a deadly weapon, throw sword like boomerang, like spear, ignore magic defences, gun-kata with crossbows.

Oh, and make them optional for customization goodness.

People don't want anime. They really don't.

The few that do play Exalted, and the vast majority that don't play DnD and are sad when they don't get to be as awesome as the Wizard without DM fiat.

The goal is to:

1. Give people what they want so the character feels like they want it to feel.

2. Make it balanced.

People don't want to be Hercules and divert rivers with their bare hands or Roland and chop mountains in half. They can't relate, and that's perfectly understandable.

They don't mind wielding a sword that can chop mountains in half. Don't ask me why, but that it what people want, and if you don't give it to them you have failed on Point 1.

[Judging__Eagle]

I'm sort of working on something like this in IMOI. The idea is that there are tiers of 'value'; and everyone gets access to the same amount of Tier slots.

The 'power' of an item is either static; for low end tiers, or scaling for the higher tiers, eventually becoming genre iconic; and then character iconic.

The 'max' Tier is: be a spellcaster, be a jedi, be Tetsuo Ishida, own the full Excalibur set (sword + scabbard), own a Borg cube, own some artifact that lets you fight Balors/Abyssal Stalkers/Your Mum/Kharne the Betrayer/Darth Vader/Borg Drones.

It's not finished, but I do want to know if it's a good way of solving this issue.

[Lago PARANOIA]

They don't mind wielding a sword that can chop mountains in half. Don't ask me why, but that it what people want, and if you don't give it to them you have failed on Point 1.

That's a cool theory, K.

Or maybe the only reason they want it is because D&D and hack derivative settings like Final Fantasy and Record of Lodoss War tells them that's how things are supposed to go so people play along?

Seriously, Tome of Battle was probably the best-loved book of 3.5E, even though it's completely antithetical to what a traditional D&D fighter is supposed to be. Why do you think that is?

[God_of_Awesome]

Do you think the people who like anime and like DnD are different crowd? While magic weapons as a class feature rocks, that can't be the only option. Fighting-Men (As I shall call them: Fighter, Barbarians, Monk and Rogues), need to have the awesome sauce option of being awesome sauce instead of wielding awesome sauce. Both are legitmate, but both together are uber legitmate.

So yes, stating AGAIN, the two paths you see before you; making it very clear Martial is SUPER mortal ability or make the Fighting Men classes magical. Fighter arcane, Barbarian primal, Monk psionic, Rogue shadow.

I didn't include Warlord because that's 4e and I have no authority on that. I do like their power source thing though.

[Kobajagrande]

Do you think the people who like anime and like DnD are different crowd?

Absolutely. They are two unrelated groups which overlap somewhat.

[hogarth]

Fighters ride dragons, they don't cast Fly. They have amulets that protect them from curses, they don't cast remove curse. At the high end they end up with the Sword of Thundara and shoot laser beams at people, but at no point do they shoot them from their hands, and they do it while advancing their fighting skills.

Its thematic. It doesn't matter how a character gets their power as long they compete with their enemies.

DnD of the last 15 years has been dominated by the CRPG "loot whores" who want equal numbers of magic items for everyone even if they are a wizard who doesn't need them, but if we look at the fiction that starts with Conan and ends with Wheel of Time, we'll see that warrior guys get all the good magic items. Jack Vance's heroes run through magic items like they came out of a dollar store and even Mat from WoT ends up with an amulet that basically makes him immune to magic which lets him play in the same world as Rand who can blow up entire armies.

Although it completely breaks with DnD tradition, the sad fact is that characters should be paying class features to use magic items as powerful as class features. Anything else is unbalanced on first principles.

I agree with your assessment 100%. But in a game where PCs can become spellcasters, it's seems unfair that non-spellcasters need to rely on pity and/or dumb luck in finding the right item needed in order to compete. As you point out, maybe it's not unfair if you consider "Serendipitous Magic Item" to be a fighter/rogue class ability, but still...

Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories are a particularly sad example. It's clear that any straight-up fight with a wizard would be suicide (due to Death No Save spells like Time Stop/Temporal Stasis, Imprisonment/Forlorn Encystment and the Most Excellent Prismatic Spray), so the hero is forced to rely on trickery and magic items -- magic items that are burglarised or given as gifts from wizards who have a whole houseful of that shit anyways.

Again, as you point out above, in fantasy fiction enemy wizards are generally puzzle monsters. A fight usually ends up with the discovery that the BBEG is water-soluble (viz. Wizard of Oz) or some lame shit like that.

[Ferret]

What we're working out currently in my campaign is as follows:

No such thing as no-save spells. If it affects another being, there is a save.

The various save-booster feats can be taken multiple times and stack (and if you take them mutliple times there will be some additional benefit, but that is still being hammered out.)

Fighters will get a damage reduction; Barbarians will get better damage reduction or more temp hit points. I'm toying with the idea of proposing a skill-based Spell Resistance ability (Judging_Eagle, I may just steal your Concentration = Fuck your Magic skill - gracias!).

I'm trying to model something similar to Karsa Oorlong from the Malazan Books of the Fallen. Someone who's just such an onery cuss that he assholes his way out of your spells.

[Kaiterra]

I think K's notion about fighter guys being the ones who get the cool magic items has some merit. I propose that in such a game you'd balance it out to please spellcasters who want loot too by making spells something you have to find instead of automatically getting. That can be their treasure, and it can be appropriately powerful. You could even say that these "spells" include permanent or semi-permanent augments.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think K's notion about fighter guys being the ones who get the cool magic items has some merit.

So fighters are clotheshorses or gadgeteers now?

If fighters need magical loot to turn into mice, to fly, to detect invisible creatures, to have brief glimpses of the future, and to tunnel through walls what makes them so special from just any jackass plucked off of the street and handed all of this shit?

The more bullshit you make a fighter rely on outside sources the less special the actual character is. They're nothing more than glorified bodyguards, their kickassery a result of wizardly kindness or stupidity.

[Koumei]

If fighters need magical loot to turn into mice, to fly, to detect invisible creatures, to have brief glimpses of the future, and to tunnel through walls what makes them so special from just any jackass plucked off of the street and handed all of this shit?

Simple. If the Fighter was going to be made this way, then the actual class features would be "You get X. You find it under a wheelbarrow." "A magic Y falls out of the sky with your name on it." and so on. They would actually *get* the items just by existing, no matter where they are, similar to how taking your first level in Wizard means suddenly you have a book, or turning into a Barbazu gives you a glaive.

[Quantumboost]

It would also involve there being prerequisites to using magic items (or at least some magic items, possibly only class-level derived magic items) which fighters can more easily - or exclusively - fulfill. To avoid the casters taking the class-level-granted items to Voltron into a Mega-Caster with the power of two people. Kind of like UMD being a fighter-only skill, or magic weapons and armor requiring X BAB in order to use to full or near-full potential.

That might very well end up with magic items being the equivalents of scaling feats - so there'd be [Combat] items which scale by BAB, [Skill] items which scale with skill ranks, and [Magic] items which scale based on casteriness (probably should be restricted to things like staves and wands which give more spell slots/charges of spells).