Why no Full action spells?

[Psychic Robot]

This, of course, leads to the inevitable discussion of what fighters are supposed to be able to do, aside from stabbing people in the face.

[Ice9]

I don't think auto-hit on a "default" attack is a problem, assuming you give people things to trade that auto-hit for. Power Attack, for example, should be available to everyone, with the feat just giving a better ratio. Then make some feats that do extra stuff (weakening, dazing, blinding, etc) in exchange for attack penalties. Of course, this would at least require that attack bonus stayed enough on the RNG that you were either auto-hitting or doing extra stuff, not everything at once.

[MGuy]

This, of course, leads to the inevitable discussion of what fighters are supposed to be able to do, aside from stabbing people in the face.

I think Tomes came up with the best solution for this question. They should be able to run interference. They should be able to stop the Samurai from charge critting them, stop a caster from casting, etc etc. In fact that's what I based the Soldier (fighter) and Knight classes in my game to do. I think going smashy smashy as a solution to everything is the Barbarian's job. Fighters should be negating, or at least reducing the effectiveness of other people's attacks.

[TheFlatline]

This, of course, leads to the inevitable discussion of what fighters are supposed to be able to do, aside from stabbing people in the face.

I'll take the question one step further.

Should we even have whack-bonk fighters any more?

It's rare in almost every other genre of (non-gaming) fantasy to have *simply* a whack-bonk fighter. It's been stated before that your melee people tend to have other skills than "I hit it with my axe" into infinity.

At the very least, making a fighter-style character choose between the bow and the sword for your character progression is kind of bullshit. I saw the intent in 3.x fighters as being a sort of non-specialist specialist for all things martial, but in order to remain effective you end up having to specialize into a one trick pony anyway. That isn't even addressing the issue of what a fighter does outside of combat. They have leadership options, but I've yet to play in, or run a game, where that comes into significant play.

Trying to shoehorn in abilities and options into the fighter seems to not be a very elegant or effective solution. Maybe it's time to take the fighter out to the pasture and let him retire, enhancing other character classes to pick up the melee damage output.

I hate eliminating entire character classes however. The only other thing I can see is perhaps to keep the fighter but eliminate one of the perks of wizards and tone down some of the utter nuking capabilities, while maintaining versatility.

I dunno though. Fighters in their current paradigm just seem to be a dead end. They were canon fodder in Chainmail, and have sort of maintained that role ever since. Their job is to simply keep the monsters from geeking the mage first.

[RobbyPants]

Well, a straight up "fighter" works pretty well in a simple game. That's probably why it was created in the first place.

Picture old RPGs like Final Fantasy (1) where enemies don't fly, there's never a chasm between you and them, and it's just an HP grind fest with a bit of buffs/debuffs mixed in. The fighter is the backbone of the party in that game.

However, in anything higher than low-level D&D, interesting combats don't look anything like that. So, even the argument that a fighter is supposed to be good at fighting and not out of combat doesn't even hold up. You need "out of combat" abilities to cope in combat.

Making the fighter something like a 5-level class would do what you want, in that he exists, but he's forced to retire or branch out when he stops being relevant.

[Roy]

Lol at people complaining about Fighters auto hitting. Um, they've always done that. Their problem has been hitting hard enough to make things care that they are being hit.

Bullshit. As I just explained at length fighters have plenty of issues. Lack of damage however is not one of them. A well-built fighter will destroy anything he can attack. Unfortunately "well-built" pretty much means a charger, power-attack-abuser or archer. Your feats will be more or less fixed, your skills set 5 levels in advance, your class and prestige class progression very rigid and if your DM is at all stingy with magic items you will suffer - but killing monsters is not an issue.

And if you don't follow the exact build specifically aimed at heavily increasing your damage so that you can keep up with enemy HP? Oh right, you hit for 20, or some weaksauce ignorable number like that. But you still do in fact hit. Just not hard enough to make anything past level 3 care you hit them.

And even the charger and whatever that can both ensure they hit attack vs AC and can actually make things care about their damage is still foiled by so many things, all of which boil down to 'you don't get to attack it, so no one cares that you'd do eleventeen billion damage if you could' that the Fighter is still Fail.

Thanks for playing.