The End of 4e D&D.

[MGuy]

Back to the solid iron demon and the fighter. If you want the fighter to be able to do jack fuck all against the demon, you have two choices:

• Nerf the demon. The demon is not made out of iron or something equivalently as strong. The demon is just some dude with wings that a normal sword propelled by a normal human arm is perfectly capable of wounding.
• Give the fighter some fucking super powers. The super power to, for example, break shit made out of solid iron!

There is no fucking option 3. If you think there is an option 3, it is because you are clinically retarded. It's just like the question of magicking up the fighter or stopping advancement. Again an still, there is no fucking option 3. Giving the fighter some hard core magicking but making it contingent on sucking the DM's cock for a super suit or a power ring is still magicking up the damn fighter. Saying the fighter can hurt the demon without any powers is still nerfing the fuck out of the opposition.

And furthermore, this is true for the adventures themselves, not just the major villains. It's not just that you cannot pierce the enemy's invulnerability without giving impressive powers to the knight or nerfing the crap out of the BBEG's invulnerability. It's that you cannot pierce the cloud castle's unassailableness without giving impressive powers to the knight or nerfing the crap out of the cloud castle's unassailableness. You cannot get to the wicked shadow kingdom without giving impressive powers to the knight or nerfing the fuck out of the wicked shadow kingdom's remoteness.

Without the power to do amazing things that a normal human could not do, you cannot have adventures where the opposition has abilities of such import that a normal human could not beat them. Period. No option 3.

-Username17

Option 3: Nerf Demon + Power Up fighter.

[RandomCasualty2]

You can totally beat something that has "skin of iron" with just raw strength. You're just probably not going to beat it with a sword.

You take a big hammer or mace and you beat the crap out of it. If you happen to be really strong, you can totally take it down. You can do the same to gearwork constructs and shit. At the very least, well placed blows can totally take limbs off by breaking the joints.

About the only thing you have trouble with is something made out 100% solid iron with no joints that somehow magically bends.

I mean fuck, the fighter wearing full plate has "skin of iron" too.

And seriously, I don't see the need to actually have stuff like that.

[souran]

That's the source one friend always draws from when he wanks on about Batman. I can't tell you the number of times he's mentioned it and that "He is just a man" with a bloodied Superman grinning at them.

This whole conversation is bullshit anyway. Batman DOES have a superpower in the complete-with-everything where all the comics have taken place DC universe.

Batman/Bruce Wayne is the smartest man EVER. Smarter than All the villians combined. He is so smart as a detective that he is the only person that knows ALL the superheros secret identites, and he knows it because he is apperently the only person in the whole world that is not fooled by a pair of fucking classes or some other bullshit (as in nobody tells batman their secret identity, he figures them all out).

Hell in one stupid ass comic he makes a BOOK OF THE WEAKNESS OF ALL THE "REAL" SUPERHEROS IN CASE THEY TURN EVIL. Which in D&D terms I guess is Intellegence Max. Wisdom 1 but whatever.

Also, as has been pointed out, Batman has the power of "being rich enough to be able to get his hands on whatever it would take to stop something" he has access to gadgets that are basically a host of powers all on their own. However, in this aspect he is the "fighter" that the rest of the party has given all the games magic items to because nobody else gives a fuck bout them compared to their class abilties....

[MfA]

I think Guts from Berserk is a better example.

[FatR]

I think Guts from Berserk is a better example.

Yeah. That dude who is tougher than stone, can run so fast that human mooks cannot see him, is loaded on artifacts and explicitly stated to be magically enhanced.

[RobbyPants]

And seriously, I don't see the need to actually have stuff like that.

High fantasy?

So, basically, not having stuff like that is in effect nerfing the demon. You deliberately design your game world so that the threats are nerfed down to the mundane fighter's power level.

[TOZ]

Point blank, if your demons can be killed by a mere mortal, they are not that tough. They might be dangerous and deadly, but if you can kill them with a sharp piece of metal, they are not super demons. They're just a lower-planes version of a grizzly bear.

[MfA]

Yeah. That dude who is tougher than stone, can run so fast that human mooks cannot see him, is loaded on artifacts and explicitly stated to be magically enhanced.

He is a Christmas tree and has some curses and protections cast on him, but his own abilities are simply badass normal.

The fluff is important to people ... some people would rather be a badass normal enhanced by an artifact armor than someone who is inherently supernatural. Christmas tree hatred be damned.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Ugh. I fucking hate Tvtropes sometimes, but I'm tired of you jackasses equivocating the terms.

There are two kinds of 'Badass Normals' and that page does no one any favors by combining them without telling people what is going on.

Badass Normal #1) Someone who gets the ability to have supernatural powers without using any phlebtonium.

Roranora Zoro from One Piece is type 1. In the first set of arcs, he is able to fight after losing 5.5 liters of blood, can deflect machine-gun fire by waving his swords really fast, and can lift a damn building and throw it at people. The story explicitly tells us that he got his powers by doing 'regular' human training at a frenzied pace rather than exploiting Haki, a devil fruit, or some special genetics.

Badass Normal #2) Someone who is able to take on supernatural foes while doing no feats a regular human in real life couldn't do.

Drake from Read or Die is this character. He's able to fight superpowered literary book clones using nothing but his soldier training and righteous equipment. He does not at one point do anything that a 'real' highly skill person couldn't do.



Those are two different archetypes. And I don't appreciate you stupid fucks dancing about the two terms by going 'Zoro keeps up just fine! And he's a badass normal!' to justify 'Therefore Drake, who is also a badass normal. can keep up with Zoro's pace, too!'

[Lago PARANOIA]

but his own abilities are simply badass normal.

No, they're not.

If you need flight, holy swordsmanship, fire resistance, see-invisibility goggles, a teleportation ring, and super-strength in order to kill level-appropriate opposition then you are not using your own abilities. For fuck's sake four of those things are enough of a superpower on its own to make a character. At the end of friggin' Dragonball only a handful of people could actually fly.

If you want to play that kind of character, then fine, but stop stacking your character with superpowers and going 'durrr, I'm the same kind of hero as Bruce Willis and Xavier!' You already have more superpowered shit than most of the members of the Justice League, stop insulting real unpowered heroes with your bullshit.

[MfA]

Lago ... the second isn't really relevant to a game though, because the real weapon in such a case is plot control and plot armour.

PS. I guess I should say not relevant to D&D, metagame abilities are acceptable in other games.

[xechnao]

Yeah. That dude who is tougher than stone, can run so fast that human mooks cannot see him, is loaded on artifacts and explicitly stated to be magically enhanced.

He is a Christmas tree and has some curses and protections cast on him, but his own abilities are simply badass normal.

The fluff is important to people ... some people would rather be a badass normal enhanced by an artifact armor than someone who is inherently supernatural. Christmas tree hatred be damned.

Guts' brand is such that he transcends the "prime material" plane to a point where he can try out the supernatural maddness he has experienced. The evil + power combo that sees in demons and stuff.
Of course this "evil power" is something relative to the standards of the "prime material" experience.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago ... the second isn't really relevant to a game though, because the real weapon in such a case is plot control and plot armour.

You can't give a character the 'power' of plot control and plot armor, unless you are just going to say in-game that the character is really, really, really lucky. But other than that, that's not even a weapon; how do you justify that in game?

Cleric: 'Sir Fighter, how were you able to survive standing in the demon's aura for a minute, hot enough to incinerate rock, and cleave the demon who can survive being pelted with catapult stones repeatedly in twain despite not having any special powers or equipment?'
Fighter: Because the plot said that I needed to survive so it nerfed the demon / I really am just that lucky / who knows, who cares?

[MfA]

You can't ... not unless you want to turn D&D into Fate.

PS. that's not how plot armour works, he would have had time to plan some elaborate trap, or there would be some environmental hazard he could spot with his quick intellect which he could trigger to defeat the demon ... etc. etc. Guts just swings his 1 ton sword and stands there with his face melting off like Chev Chelios and shrugs it off ... which is why Guts works in D&D and Drake doesn't.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What Lago calls "hugboxery", i.e., not allowing me to deface the page for, say, Exalted, until it bleeds tears of blood can be irritating as well,

That's not just irritating, that's a complete dealbreaker.

If you can't say straight-up 'So Bad It's Horrible: Exalted: Lunars is the most offensive book since Racial Holy War for smugly depicting rape, cannibalism, and genocide as heroic values' but you can say that Racial Holy War is one of the worst books ever then you do not have an honest website or fandom.

Imagine if you had a D&D fansite and you weren't allowed to say Magic of Faerun is a pile of goatshit because it would hurt the feelings of some fans.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You can't ... not unless you want to turn D&D into Fate.

Okay... so how does the fighter take on the Solid Iron Demon?

You don't want him to be meta and win just because he has 4th-wall breaking powers.

You don't want to give him mortal swordsman superpowers like Zoro.

And you don't want to turn him into Iron Man: 1068 by loading him with more bling than the actual Iron Man.

We're about out of options; so far, people like CG and Psychic Robot and RC have been telling me that the fighter beats the Solid Iron Demon... just because they say so? That because it happened in other stories they should be allowed to do it to? That my sense of science is bad, you really CAN hurt an iron golem with regular human abilities if you just 'strike it in the right spot'? Because the Solid Iron Demon is actually 'Demon with slightly tougher but still pierceable skin?' Who the fuck knows.

Who the fuck knows.

[MfA]

Okay... so how does the fighter take on the Solid Iron Demon?

By hitting him really fucking hard.

You don't want to give him mortal swordsman superpowers like Zoro.

And you don't want to turn him into Iron Man: 1068 by loading him with more bling than the actual Iron Man.

I think I misunderstood where you were going. I agree ... one or both of these things are necessary and I don't have a problem with either really (which for the latter seems to make me one of a kind on this board).

[RobbyPants]

Okay... so how does the fighter take on the Solid Iron Demon?

By hitting him really fucking hard.

Harder than a normal person could?

[hogarth]

Okay... so how does the fighter take on the Solid Iron Demon?

By hitting him really fucking hard.

Harder than a normal person could?

Define "normal". Do you mean "non-magical" or "average"?

[RobbyPants]

Non-magical.

[Kaelik]

I think I misunderstood where you were going. I agree ... one or both of these things are necessary and I don't have a problem with either really (which for the latter seems to make me one of a kind on this board).

Nah, the rest of us just got bored of dealing with PR and RCs stupid "Fighters should be perfectly normal in every way, but then also be able to deal with totally not normal shit. Like for example, shooting a demon made of iron in the ankle so hard that it pierces his skin and doesn't allow him to teleport. But he can't be strong enough to pick up a goddam house and throw it, even though he can convey over 12000lbs per square inch of force on a fired arrow."

And then my brain rejects their stupidity and I go hide somewhere to recuperate.

[sake]

Meanwhile back on the topic...

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx ... e/20100809

The nerfs to 4E for the sake of Essentials have officially* begun

Also a large number of people on the wotc forums seem to think that non str based melee classes shouldn't be allowed to have basic attacks anyway, and that 'losing 4-5 five points damage isn't a big deal' even though the whole point of the nerf is to keep Essential classes from getting a couple of extra points of damage by using Melee Training to turn themselves into single stat classes. Also, the fact that it was already was a goddamn feat tax in the first place isn't mentioned.

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... ets_nerfed





*As opposed to all the nerfs they've done for it but hadn't actually stated the reason for.

[virgil]

Nah, the rest of us just got bored of dealing with PR and RCs stupid "Fighters should be perfectly normal in every way, but then also be able to deal with totally not normal shit. Like for example, shooting a demon made of iron in the ankle so hard that it pierces his skin and doesn't allow him to teleport. But he can't be strong enough to pick up a goddam house and throw it, even though he can convey over 12000lbs per square inch of force on a fired arrow."

And then my brain rejects their stupidity and I go hide somewhere to recuperate.

They're actually referring to how it's seen in fiction. Swordsmen who literally cut mook humans in half but don't/can't throw a car are viewed as nonmagical. Weaving side-to-side and only getting scratches from a dozen people with machine guns going all out is only seen as magical if you leave afterimages or a bullet was shown giving a direct hit; just happening to only be missed/grazed is acceptable as 'normal'.

In many a fiction, claiming dumb luck as skill and never giving the character a SFX budget will relegate them to the mundane, even if what they do is supernatural at some level of thought.

[Juton]

Batman can easily take out 12 street thugs armed with baseball bats at the same time. That is clearly a superhuman level of skill. He gets bashed shot and stabbed and with the exception of things like getting his back broken he is back at 100% in time for the next issue. He is smarter than Isaac Newton and richer than Bill Gates. Comic book humans are clearly substantially different than normal humans.

Comic books have introduced this gradually over time, slowly raising the bar of what a human can accomplish. It be great if we could have something like this in D&D, but yet again : neck-beards.

[TheFlatline]

You can totally beat something that has "skin of iron" with just raw strength. You're just probably not going to beat it with a sword.

You take a big hammer or mace and you beat the crap out of it. If you happen to be really strong, you can totally take it down. You can do the same to gearwork constructs and shit. At the very least, well placed blows can totally take limbs off by breaking the joints.

I'm a blacksmith, and speaking from experience...

You're full of shit.

If the iron is even, say, a quarter of an inch thick, you're going to need a huge fucking maul or hammer to even *hope* to do some damage. And a lot of time. Ten, fifteen minutes probably to possibly bash a hole through that. If it's a full inch thick, or made of pure iron, you aren't going to do fuck-all without hours and hours of hot, heavy work. Working iron cold is a long, painful, unrewarding experience. It's why blacksmiths heated the iron up until it glowed to begin with.

If it's steel, you're even more fucked.

If it's high-carbon/properly tempered steel, you're completely useless until the mage gets you up to *minimum* red hot, if not orange hot heat.

Anyway, dealing with a creature made of metal with a hammer is worthy of a darwin award. One of the gentlemen who taught me is strong enough to use a 10 pound sledgehammer head on a stout 1-handed hammer handle, and watching him work even 1/4 inch steel, it takes time and effort at yellow hot.

Let's put this another way, that's like saying that if you're REALLY FUCKING STRONG, you can pick up a mace or a hammer and totally beat the shit out of a WW2 tank. Which is bullshit.