The reason fighters can't have nice things.

[Prak]

honestly, I think D&D needs more megamaning, where your special equipment powers frequently come from beating up your enemies.

Not a lot, but I think it should be an option, and not necessarily a protected one tied to a specific class, everyone should be able to do it.

God no. At the very best case you get the wishlist effect except it's players saying "I know it's 5 levels below us but I'd really appreciate if we fought an Ice Mephit so I can get ____ because it would really fit my character concept." At worst you've given players leave to dumpster-dive through every monster book published and voltron together combos so broken they'll make your eyes bleed.

Think about how much people can break the game just by playing an Aasimar and using Alter Self to become outsiders (really the only use of Aasimar, come to think of it).

Um... no? So you'll have players seeking out specific monsters so they cut off the gorgon's head a tote around a Flesh to Stone effect, or choking the nemean lion to death to get a cloak of DR 30/Adamantine or whatever, or tracking down the hydra and crushing it's heads to get it's awesome poison blood for their arrows.

Or fuck, felling a dragon so they can drink it's blood and gain it's magic. Or rip out it's teeth and get an awesome magical army that sprouts up when the teeth are imbeded into the ground. Or they storm hell because they want a balor's soul stealing sword.

How is any of this bad? It is awesome to have characters with goals, because it engages the players in the story. It is awesome to have characters be influenced by their opponents, and displaying a trophy of a fallen enemy, because it frequently means they took that enemy seriously.

And combos? Eh. I couldn't not give less of a shit about some hypothetical "I win" combo of monster trophies, there are already plenty of combos in D&D, including non-combos such as "Play a wizard"+"Survive to level 6*"

*or whatever

And you know what all my examples have in common? Go on, guess.

[Username17]

How is any of this bad?

Because Hercules never avoided fighting a giant turtle because he already had Lion Skin Armor in order to go fight a Hydra and upgrade his arrows. That's why.

Having your character reflect their adventures is cool, but you only have a specific finite set of adventures between level X and level Y. And having your character be not the way you wanted is not cool.

Monster defeated based advancement is essentially random advancement. How OK would you be having your character roll dice to see what skills and spells upgraded when they leveled up?

-Username17

[Sashi]

So you're really just talking about players crafting wondrous items through taxidermy? That's seriously an entirely different thing than what happens in megaman-land where fighting a giant lets you grab rock hurling or some shits.

That's seriously not even a class ability, that's maybe a magic item creation feat. And it creates the exact same problem as the "rare reagents" crafting method does: the players keep trying to hijack the story to do fetch-quests for magic items.

[Prak]

as is common, you make a good point, Frank.

However, I have to think there's got to be some kind of way to incorporate this concept, with it being so common in myth, and having so much traction in the hobby.

I just don't know what it is.

So you're really just talking about players crafting wondrous items through taxidermy? That's seriously an entirely different thing than what happens in megaman-land where fighting a giant lets you grab rock hurling or some shits.

That's seriously not even a class ability, that's maybe a magic item creation feat. And it creates the exact same problem as the "rare reagents" crafting method does: the players keep trying to hijack the story to do fetch-quests for magic items.

...you're a railroad dm, aren't you? Hijack the story? If your players want to go play megaman with the ecosystem, instead of complete your carefully crafted magnum opus, they may be telling you something.

and sorry, I was more referring to the trope, not specifically to the games, as I've never played them.

However, taking a major part of the actual megaman thing, as I understand it, could fix a couple of issues. Megaman gets the abilities of significant opponents, you're not going to take down a goblin, or even "Random Nightmare #3232689" and get a special power, but maybe when you've beaten "Recklu, Goblin Leader and Werespider" or "Coalpelt, Outrider of Hell" a certain energy (ie, phlebotinum) is released by the fact that they were a major feature in the story of history (ie, a plot important character) and you get their signature ability. This does two things, it's keeps the story on the path laid out by the DM (or at least doesn't contribute to straying) and it makes advancement less random, at the cost increasing it's reliance on the DM making level appropriate challenges and rewards, admittedly.

[Sashi]

One of my characters carried around a chunk (specifically the face) of an animated statue that was a total bitch to fight at level 1. It seriously just hung from his belt via a little webbing pouch for ages until he threw it at the BBEG during a fight just because he was totally pissed at the dude (it did 1d6 damage).

One of my players had, by the end of her adventuring career, decked out her entire gear with pieces of the monstrous beasts she fought. Her helm was the head of a huge preying mantis, her gloves were bear paws, her "greatsword" was a length of dragonbone studded with the teeth of a half-dozen creatures and her belt was (secretly) made from the tanned hide of a dude who seriously cheesed her off in the first adventure by being a patronizing sexist.

None of these things had special "I cut these gloves from a bear so now I have a claw attack" type powers. The bear paws were just her +STR gloves, and the sword was just a +2 Keen greatsword, and the mantis-helm was just really fucking unnerving.

[Sashi]

...you're a railroad dm, aren't you? Hijack the story? If your players want to go play megaman with the ecosystem, instead of complete your carefully crafted magnum opus, they may be telling you something.

It has nothing to do with "railroading" and everything to do with incentives. It's the same reason I reward my players for accomplishing goals (that more often than not -they- state) rather than killing things: if they only get rewarded for stabbing things in the face then they really do start making decisions like "We could sneak past the sleeping Ogre, but if we do we can't murderate it for the XP". The actual goals of the PC's, which include things like "don't pick unnecessary fights with ogres" get subsumed in the Player's lizard-brain pursuit of whatever mechanically increases their power.

However, taking a major part of the actual megaman thing, as I understand it, could fix a couple of issues. Megaman gets the abilities of significant opponents, you're not going to take down a goblin, or even "Random Nightmare #3232689" and get a special power, but maybe when you've beaten "Recklu, Goblin Leader and Werespider" or "Coalpelt, Outrider of Hell" a certain energy (ie, phlebotinum) is released by the fact that they were a major feature in the story of history (ie, a plot important character) and you get their signature ability. This does two things, it's keeps the story on the path laid out by the DM (or at least doesn't contribute to straying) and it makes advancement less random, at the cost increasing it's reliance on the DM making level appropriate challenges and rewards, admittedly.

What issues does this fix at all? A player getting a "signature ability" off of a "plot important character" is no different from a player getting a "signature magic item" off of a "plot important character" except ... well, worse. If the players want batwings and you never give them an opponent with batwings what do they do? Do they pick up manticore claws and then trade them it at Signature Ability Mart for batwings? Or do you get a wishlist of signature abilities from players and shoehorn them onto plot-relevant NPC's?

[hogarth]

I mean, Thor and Hercules have serialized adventures where they can compete with suitably epic things, but at no point do they ever get a power-up where suddenly their old class of enemies are no longer a reasonable threat.

Exactly. That's why the idea of "mid-to-high level fighters can be like Hercules" is dumb -- because there's no such thing as Level 1 Hercules, unless you want to play a snake-strangling baby.

[JonSetanta]

Exactly. That's why the idea of "mid-to-high level fighters can be like Hercules" is dumb -- because there's no such thing as Level 1 Hercules, unless you want to play a snake-strangling baby.

Nice one.

[Judging__Eagle]

New Backgrounds
Because you can't have enough

Child Adventurer
You're able to be an Adventurer before you hit the proper age

Your character can be any starting age, even newborn, and counts as being an adult for your species. They have no penalties to using equipment that is a different size for them; but it must still be something that they could wear. The creature can carry an adult sized weapon, but not adult sized armour; it would have to be custom made (masterwork item).

You may count as being one size category smaller than your species normally is, with the usual MM based effects (+4 Hide, -4 Grapple, +1 AC/To-Hit, lowered Strength, Increased Dexterity, reduced Natural Armour etc.).

People automatically treat you one category more friendly if you can get them to be friendly towards you; since you're just a kid and you're also a adventurer. People also will always treat you like a kid; so that will add extra challenges that are still pretty trivial, but also annoying.

[K]

I mean, Thor and Hercules have serialized adventures where they can compete with suitably epic things, but at no point do they ever get a power-up where suddenly their old class of enemies are no longer a reasonable threat.

Exactly. That's why the idea of "mid-to-high level fighters can be like Hercules" is dumb -- because there's no such thing as Level 1 Hercules, unless you want to play a snake-strangling baby.

Exactly.

It works like this: in a serialized adventure, the hero DOES accumulate magic items that get used in later adventures. Sometimes they even learn new techniques, but they never actually leave their wheelhouse or overall power level.

It's like Gilgamesh starts and ends his career at level 17 as a king and 2/3rd divine. We never hear stories of him at level 2 when he was killing giant rats and we certainly don't get stories of him at level 25 when he should be able to kill gods.

The fact that sometimes he has easy adventures and sometimes he has hard ones doesn't allow him the ability to surpass his already considerable limits.

And that's the model for heroes pre-DnD. They sometimes start as normal people who get elevated to a pre-set power level and sometimes they start at that power level through divine or upernatural birthright, but as characters they never actually exceed that pre-determined power level in any meaningful way. At best, they have adventures of slightly varying difficulty levels (Grendel is a difficult fight, and Grendel's mother is more difficult fight, but he could have fought her first and it wouldn't have mattered).

Vasilia doesn't go on to fight an army of witches. Robin Hood never kills a dragon. Conan never fights anything that can't be handled by a sword or by strangling with his own hands.

If they did, the stories would be told differently. Conan would have part of his adventures as we know him, then he'd have some adventures where he rides a dragon and fights things he never could have fought before, and then he'd pick up an artifact that lets him fight armies or something.

[Maj]

We never hear stories of him at level 2 when he was killing giant rats and we certainly don't get stories of him at level 25 when he should be able to kill gods.

Jesus.

[K]

We never hear stories of him at level 2 when he was killing giant rats and we certainly don't get stories of him at level 25 when he should be able to kill gods.

Jesus.

Jesus starts as the son of God. He runs around performing various divine miracles. Then he exits stage left.

Various books of the Bible canon that didn't make it past the Council of Nicea have him as a kid pushing his playmate off the roof and killing him and then bring him back to life. He never even has a training montage, which makes him less interesting than various heroes who get a one-time power up after they get their magic item(s) or special training.

He's a demigod, and his story parallels Hercules and Gilgamesh.

The only full god that gets childhood adventures is Krishna, and even those are on par with what he accomplishes later in life.

[Josh_Kablack]

Conan never fights anything that can't be handled by a sword or by strangling with his own hands.

The T-Rex in Red Nails disagrees.

[Maxus]

Conan never fights anything that can't be handled by a sword or by strangling with his own hands.

The T-Rex in Red Nails disagrees.

I suppose technically so does that critter sent by Thoth-Amon the Set worshipping guy. Well, Conan got an assist on that one. And killed it with his GMW'd sword.

[Username17]

Yeah, actually Conan encounters a fair number of enemies that he has to beat by turning to assistance from sorcery from other people. Conan is just a really shitty example of the Dumb Melee Fighter and I think there should be a one year moratorium on using him as an example. He wears armor, he uses bows, and his fucking physical combat abilities are not always sufficient for him to get through the adventure or defeat the final boss. The actual stories just are not the cliched oiled-up Arnold vs. Giant Snake that people think of. At least, not all of them. Not even most of them.

But regardless, fucking Beowulf. Do not avoid this one: Grendel, then Grendel's Mom. Clear, demonstrable level up to fight a clearly demonstably tougher next boss. The entire Mahabharata works like that too, but I understand that most of us here are westerners and have not read it.

Level ups are nothing new. Power creep is older than dirt.

-Username17

[Sashi]

I think K's argument is that Beowolf is level 8 and fights a CR 7 Grendel, then stays level 8 and fights a CR 9 Grendel's Mom. Beowolf didn't so much "power up" as "face a tougher challenge".

It's really difficult to discuss such things because a lot of stories suffer the Spider-Man effect: He fights Kraven, then he fights The Hulk, then he fights Kraven and is back to Kraven being a threat.

[hogarth]

I think K's argument is that Beowolf is level 8 and fights a CR 7 Grendel, then stays level 8 and fights a CR 9 Grendel's Mom. Beowolf didn't so much "power up" as "face a tougher challenge".

And also that there's no level 1 Beowulf, although "Beowulf Babies Magical Adventures" would make a great Saturday morning cartoon, I'm sure.

[Username17]

I think K's argument is that Beowolf is level 8 and fights a CR 7 Grendel, then stays level 8 and fights a CR 9 Grendel's Mom. Beowolf didn't so much "power up" as "face a tougher challenge".

And also that there's no level 1 Beowulf, although "Beowulf Babies Magical Adventures" would make a great Saturday morning cartoon, I'm sure.

There's totally a level 1 Arjuna. Seriously, that story is really fucking long and it starts with Arjuna being a gifted student and it ends with him shooting demon gods in the face and murderating his way through entire armies.

K is basically just saying that he doesn't have the patience to read old stories that are long enough that they start with weak ass protagonists and continuously ramp up the crazy until the opposition is so powerful that it doesn't make any sense any more. But they totally exist. And they existed long before Gurren Laggan, Wheel of Time, or Dungeons & Dragons.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

So let's say that you wanted to give Fighters fantastic or magical abilities. What's the best way to represent this in 3E? I mean, we do have classes like the Warblade and the Duskblade... but do they really go far enough? Do you think that these classes are salvageable with a larger spell or ability list, or would it be best to just start over from the ground up? And if so, will classes like Koumei's Verdant Master and Kaelik's Favored Soul suddenly take a hit due to lack of versatility?

[A Man In Black]

It's really difficult to discuss such things because a lot of stories suffer the Spider-Man effect: He fights Kraven, then he fights The Hulk, then he fights Kraven and is back to Kraven being a threat.

But even in that case, he fights Kraven, he fights the Hulk, then Kraven shows up as the lame intro villain or has stepped up his game in the meantime, going from Big Game Hunter to Guy Who Injected Himself With Elephant Blood Or Something.

You can't look at decades-long comic runs as a whole work, because they're a patchwork of different stories told by different people at different times. If you take storylines or single-author runs as whole works, it's a very different situation.

[K]

I think K's argument is that Beowolf is level 8 and fights a CR 7 Grendel, then stays level 8 and fights a CR 9 Grendel's Mom. Beowolf didn't so much "power up" as "face a tougher challenge".

That's exactly what I'm saying. Evidence of defeating challenges of varying difficulty does not mean you went up in level. It just means you defeated things in your general CR range.

Also, the evidence that Conan needs help to defeat bigger challenges is evidence that he didn't level.

Evidence of leveling up is really easy to see in a story. It's not "the hero now faces a slightly more difficult enemy," it comes in "the enemy that once took a team is now soloed, or the enemy that came solo now comes in a team." It's a change in the order of magnitude. The girl who defeated a witch in the first story goes on to defeat a coven, and then a army of witches. The peasant boy who fight bandits ends up riding a dragon and wielding artifacts powerful enough to level cities.

Before DnD, that wasn't even a story people told in serialized adventures. At best, people got a one-time power up when they transformed from victim to hero, but mostly they started at a fixed power level and faced adventures of varying difficulty within that power-level.

[Lago PARANOIA]

One option is making casters more item dependent too ... but I don't think you'll like that option.

Well, in addition to me not liking in abstract the idea of putting flavor constraints on any character or of course the complaint in general about people being dependent on magical items in the abstract...

Doing this will kick the fighter-types back down to Fail O' Sucky Land. Remember, the reason why fighters get to compete under this paradigm is because they have superpowers comparable to their paladin and gish buddies through exclusive use of equipment. But when you force the paladin and gishes to get exclusive equipment too, you're faced with three options:

1) Nerf all of the other classes' superpowers, make them dependent on magical items. This is half of what 4E did and I don't think anyone was satisfied by that. Not even the low-power tards--because then you married the characters to Christmas Tree items.
2) Accept the imbalance. Lame.
3) Make the magical items of the paladin and gishes weaker than that of the fighters. Unfortunately this leads to the 4E magical item problem where there are a bunch of junk drops no one really cares about insofar that it keeps them on the RNG. This is what happens when you make magical items piddling but necessary.

So I stick to my previous solution, let them screw their players as long as you can sell them the book ... fuck me again I guess?

Pretty much. I mean, really, putting in rules that you know ahead of time is going to cause strife and discontent? Screw that.

A D&D with actually useful magic items for martial characters in core would already be progress ... baby steps.

It'd also make the game completely unrecognizable. Not that I have a problem with that, I think that the entire magical item system should be overhauled so that they hand out less RNG-fucking bonuses and more superpowers. But remember that the reason you're doing this is catering to the people who wank to a specific level of power, who are by and large grognards who don't like the idea of fighters getting class features (by way of magical items) that let them travel through the astral plane, fly indefinitely, break men's minds, etc.. It'd be like McDonald's switching to an all-tofu menu in order to attract the vegans but then frying the tofu in beef lard.

That's just a question of being smart in how you design the items, to make them synergetic with certain class abilities or skills (or take the easy route, make them directly dependent on class abilities).

Such as?

1) I don't see this going in any direction other than an arbitrary way. I mean, fighters and barbarians are very limited in their choice of special effects. I think tying a 'glide indefinitely in the air' or 'teleport across the land' magical item to Weapon Specialization or Uncanny Dodge is completely laughable. If you want to keep it arbitrary, fine, but the whole point of doing it this way is to draw a logical dotted line between 'barbarian' and 'gets exclusive use of this magical item'.

2) Since the preceding special effects are limited, again, why the hell not just call all of the classes Gadgeteers and let them promote their outdated abilities into stuff like 'a minor in sneaking' or 'gets slightly stronger when angry'? It's not like you're cutting out a big portion of the class to shoehorn in their SFX--you could literally not tell the difference between a barbarian and a fighter in an Iron Man suit unless you were told. You could tell the difference between a Summoner and a Druid in an Iron Man suit though.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course there is, but honesty is overrated.

No, it's not just overrated, it's actually harmful to the game balance and the story.

When people refuse to undergo the paradigm shift between being a low-level character and a high-level character then they're undercutting their potential and dragging the rest of the party down. The tools in a fighter and barbarian and a mundane rogue's toolkit become increasingly limited over time--and the more a player is encouraged to return to the kiddie tools the more they will gimp their character concept.

The mundane characters need a bunch of tools in their new toolkit to keep up, but still pretending that the fact that they're still a Fighter or a Barbarian keeps causing them to select tools like 'make your rage more menacing' or 'gain a bonus when using your favored weapon', which are just inappropriate for high-level problem solving.

The only way around this is to completely cut off access to magical items that advance mundane schticks after a certain point or couple them to magical items that give useful superpowers. But when you get to that point, you're already admitting that fighter/barbarian/mundane/etc.. powers are irrelevant and that they need to get powers more suited to that of a Gadgeteer. So why not say so?

[Maj]

Jesus starts as the son of God.

Irrelevant. The important part is character growth, which according to the most widespread and well-known version of the myth, we totally see.

He runs around performing various divine miracles. Then he exits stage left.

He starts off as a baby, grows up into a kid who likes to run away and have theological debates with religious scholars, and turns into a dude who turns water into wine. It culminates with his death and full transformation into a deity. Saying there's no progression there is retarded. It's not like people who touched his swaddling clothes were healed of their afflictions, yet in the end, he ends up unkillable and able to heal people who touch his clothes.

Various books of the Bible canon that didn't make it past the Council of Nicea

Don't care. You wanted an example of a pre1970s story that showed character progression/leveling, and now you're using ancient religious fan-fiction to justify your notion of why the example fails.

[Zinegata]

Heh. Remind me to use the term religious fanfiction when talking about the gnostic gospels, because that is a rather funny yet appropriate way of calling them.

Also, we do need to remember that in a lot of legends (i.e. Beowulf) we only get to see the character's most epic feats - when it's implied that there is a backstory where little Beowulf was off killing smaller things before being forced to face Grendel.

Because killing deer as a kid doesn't exactly fit the narrative of an epic story. In an RPG though, such low-level adventures are kosher.