3e: Was there a consumer demand for caster dominance?

[Dominicius]

I distinctly recall that there was a thread around here about giving fighter metagame abilities as a possible solution. I think the idea didn't really impress people.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It doesn't go over well because if you're not playing a comedy or postmodern game having a class that relies on the metagame for its phlebtonium breaks the fourth wall too much for people to enjoy.

I personally reject it because, like the Magic Item Mart Gift Card class feature, it's just a way for people to live in denial about their paradigm.

[CatharzGodfoot]

There's no inherent a problem will spellcasters being more powerful than more mundane characters.


It's possible to imagine spellcasters who regularly do the 'impossible' and are yet completely outclassed by people who just train really hard to be totally awesome. What isn't possible is spellcasters who command armies of the undead from flying castles while throwing up walls of ice or flame with a gesture being outclassed by people who just train really hard. You can come up with all kinds of 'power source' excuses where a swordsman's flight isn't 'magic', but that's bullshit.

Let me repeat that: Power sources are BULLSHIT.

It doesn't matter if you were raised by condors, practiced really hard, or made a pact with a demon. What matters is what you can do. No matter what your game's glossary says, a character that regularly does the impossible is magic. There comes a point at which being really good at what you do can no longer beat doing the impossible, and that is the point at which you either have to become magic or go sit at the little kid's table.

[Krusk]

I always liked the idea of forcing mundanes to become magic at some point. Hard code into the game fighting in melee isnt an option. You can start as a sworder, but by level 6 you need to prestige into dragon tamer, leader of the people,, or gadgeteer.

If you really only want to play mundanes that's fine, houserule the game, make your own, and don't expect it to work right. If someone insists on being the mundane, start your game at level 1 and plan to end by the end of level 6.

Early casters are reigned in to What is effectively a magic archer. Maybe some utility stuff that is replicatable with skills.

[Libertad]

One option several RPGs and fictional worlds incorporate is the acceptance of a lack of balance between casters and non-casters.

In the World of Darkness, Vampires are simply better than normal humans in almost every way despite their crippling weaknesses. Vampire: the Masquerade has rules for humans, yet the game assumes that every PC's a vampire.

A possibility for games is to do the "everyone has magic or nobody does" route. If you make a Harry Potter RPG, then you should structure the game around players being Wizards instead of trying to incorporate a Muggle/Wizard/Muggle group.

A possibility for D&D, then, is to make it so that the high-level guys get "magical" abilities to do cool stuff. This is in line with many campaign settings. In Forgotten Realms, magic is built into the essence of the world; in Dragonlance, magic is a gift from the Gods. It should be plausible in such settings that a powerful swordmaster or thief gets some nifty power from using techniques to "harness the power of the land" or gains "righteous fury" from his patron deity.

Or you can go Gurrenn Lagann and have sheer willpower grant people the ability to exceed expectations.

[ishy]

Or you can make the non magic classes scale better with magical buffs or something. So that a polymorph spell is only utility for a wizard and a combat boost for the fighter.

While at the same time making the non-caster effective at killing and controlling the battlefield and turning casters down a notch.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Or you can make the non magic classes scale better with magical buffs or something. So that a polymorph spell is only utility for a wizard and a combat boost for the fighter.

While at the same time making the non-caster effective at killing and controlling the battlefield and turning casters down a notch.

I don't think anyone would actually like that solution, because it feels too metagamey and you still have the fact that a party of all fighers is useless.

[hyzmarca]

It's alright for there to be some things that a caster can do that a non-caster can't. But the converse has to be true as well. There should be things that a non-caster can do that a caster will never be able to accomplish.


If your party is all fighters, then you don't give them any challenges that require casters to beat. If your party is all casters then you don't give them any challenges that require fighters to beat. If your party is mixed then you give them mixed challenges so that both can shine.


The only problem with such a paradigm is that you have to redo practically everything from the ground up to accomplish it.

[MfA]

I think that most martial/rogue/face players wouldn't really care that the caster had the best solution for 75% of situations ... as long as they didn't intrude on their niches or make their niches irrelevant.

[Zinegata]

The "gap" between casters and non-casters would close if people would put greater limitations on what kind of spells that casters can actually cast.

For a martial class to gain a special and unique power, he/she usually has to reach a certain level and be stuck with that power forever (in the form of feats or special abilities).

For a caster class, once they hit the proper level they can simply pray to their God or read the spell book to switch out to what they need every evening.

[Libertad]

I remember some folks suggested using Tome of Battle classes to replace the Fighter/Monk/Paladin while getting rid of Clerics, Druids, and Wizards.

The Favored Soul would fill the role of the Cleric, while "magical theme" classes like the Dread Necromancer and Beguiler would be the default spellcasters.

The theory is that such classes would be easier to manage since they couldn't add spells with splatbooks or wait 24 hours to switch out for a new set of spells.

This does close the gap a little, but the Tome of Battle guys still don't have a lot of out-of-combat utility, while guys like the Beguiler can still kick ass in a lot of situations.

[Ice9]

Or you can make the non magic classes scale better with magical buffs or something. So that a polymorph spell is only utility for a wizard and a combat boost for the fighter.

While at the same time making the non-caster effective at killing and controlling the battlefield and turning casters down a notch.

I don't think anyone would actually like that solution, because it feels too metagamey and you still have the fact that a party of all fighers is useless.

Actually, there's a pretty easy explanation that works rather well for that. Everyone has a reserve of vital energy. Casters learn how to channel that energy into spells. Non-casters can't channel that energy, so it just sits there accumulating; when they get a buff spell or magic item, the stored energy supercharges it.

The problem with that is that it primarily just helps non-casters be better in combat, which isn't that hard to do anyway. Making them useful outside of battle is the real challenge.


Personally, I'm pretty much in favor of this:

I always liked the idea of forcing mundanes to become magic at some point. Hard code into the game fighting in melee isnt an option. You can start as a sworder, but by level 6 you need to prestige into dragon tamer, leader of the people,, or gadgeteer.

You can dance around it for a while, but at some point, you just need to flat out say "No, we are not doing normal dudes with swords any more - play lower level if you want that."

[virgil]

Or you can make the non magic classes scale better with magical buffs or something. So that a polymorph spell is only utility for a wizard and a combat boost for the fighter.

While at the same time making the non-caster effective at killing and controlling the battlefield and turning casters down a notch.

I don't think anyone would actually like that solution, because it feels too metagamey and you still have the fact that a party of all fighers is useless.

Actually, there's a pretty easy explanation that works rather well for that. Everyone has a reserve of vital energy. Casters learn how to channel that energy into spells. Non-casters can't channel that energy, so it just sits there accumulating; when they get a buff spell or magic item, the stored energy supercharges it.

The problem with that is that it primarily just helps non-casters be better in combat, which isn't that hard to do anyway. Making them useful outside of battle is the real challenge.

Include magic items and noncombat buffs in that for the supercharging. In effect, have buffs and magic items scale with the mana of the recipient rather than the caster. That ring/spell of water breathing lets a wizard not drown, yet the fighter becomes a badass shark with arms when underwater.

[Lago PARANOIA]

virgil: Why not make the character a Gadgeteer then? That way you could have 'Fighter' or 'Rogue' or 'Barbarian' just by compressing those abilities into one-time feat packages. You'd save on space and have a more flavorful class.

[TheFlatline]

Or you can make the non magic classes scale better with magical buffs or something. So that a polymorph spell is only utility for a wizard and a combat boost for the fighter.

While at the same time making the non-caster effective at killing and controlling the battlefield and turning casters down a notch.

That only lasts as long as your developers are on board with you. As soon as you bring in someone who things that wizards should pwn because MAGIC!!!! you are back to the original problem.

Sooner or later a dipshit is going to come along who sucks magic cock so hard that he's offended by the idea that magic has limitations. To him, magic specifically means "no limitations", and the balance you've set up goes out the window when he creates "mage polymorph: mages gain +10 strength and gain the BAB of fighters" or some shit like that.

[Username17]

I remember some folks suggested using Tome of Battle classes to replace the Fighter/Monk/Paladin while getting rid of Clerics, Druids, and Wizards.

The Favored Soul would fill the role of the Cleric, while "magical theme" classes like the Dread Necromancer and Beguiler would be the default spellcasters.

The theory is that such classes would be easier to manage since they couldn't add spells with splatbooks or wait 24 hours to switch out for a new set of spells.

This does close the gap a little, but the Tome of Battle guys still don't have a lot of out-of-combat utility, while guys like the Beguiler can still kick ass in a lot of situations.

Stuff like the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer is probably how casters should work. People want their wizards to have groups of similarly themed magics at their disposal.

It does not by itself fix things. Because non-casters still need to do something to affect the world outside combat and the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer actually have a very deep set of utility magic. But it solves the issue where people want tightly themed magic but the Vancian system incentivizes players to get spells that are as functionally and conceptually different from one another as possible to maximize coverage.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Wonder Woman's steel door strength tearing, super breath, telepathy, & 160wpm typing powers (which could be negated when tied up by a man) used to be pure training before she became a godly endowed clay statue.

Well, in Greek mythology, normal humans are supposedly descended from animated rocks, after the 'made of clay' version proved to soft to deal with the contents of Pandora's box so...

[Username17]

In the new version, she's just a plain regular half-god Amazon.

-Username17

[tzor]

Getting back to the original argument. I always thought and assumed that the big evolution of the mega jump between casters and non casters in 3E was the systematic simplification of the magic system. There were a lot of checks and balances in 1E's magic. These were thought to be "un-fun" and were thus removed. Consider the 9th level wish.

Other forms of wishes, however, will cause the spell caster to be weak (-3 on strength) and require 2 to 8 days of bed rest due to the stresses the wish places upon time, space, and his or her body.

Note second edition has the same wording (only replacing 2 to 8 with 2d4 and adding a 5 year age stress on the caste.

Then came 3E which had a list of things that were well beyond the simple 1E with options, "with respect to hit points sustained by a party, to bring a dead character back to life, or to escape from a difficult situation by lifting the spel caster (and his or her party) from one place to another," which biasically had no effects on the caster for overcasting.

You may wish for effects greater than these, but doing so is dangerous.

Back in the 1st and 2nd editions, the various rules on casters put significant limits on their abilities. All of these limitations were generally removed. Removing limitations on fighters, ironically made it better for everyone else to fight, not for fighters to fight better. So while simplification for wizards helped wizards, simplification for fighters hurt fighters.

[Vebyast]

My solution was just to give players either three identical, interchangeable, easily-replenishable fighters or one caster. Players ended up getting roughly the same screen time (spell selection versus tactics and rolling), and having twice as many pieces on the field made fights quite a bit more interesting, tactically speaking.

[Doom]

That's an interesting idea...I used "every gets a caster and a fighter", which worked to some effect.

[echoVanguard]

The fanbase wants things which are not compatible. They want balanced classes, but they want wizards to be able to overcome challenges that are outright impossible for non-magical types.

Most damning of all is the basic Elennsar logic on display. What people want is generic fantasy literature. They want wizards to be objectively more powerful than warriors and they want the warriors to win anyway by "overcoming the odds". That's really what people want, even though that is one of the things that most demonstrably cannot be given by a game system.

-Username17

Couldn't this be accomplished by giving warrior-types higher saves, more rerolls, and other "overcome the odds" type bonuses? Dresden Files RPG does this by assigning each character a fixed amount of "narrative influence" (Refresh) which takes various forms - spells for spellcasters, ad-hoc bonuses and rerolls for mortals, and weird powers for monster-race characters. I'm not personally advocating this idea - I'm in the camp of "get magic, already". But I think it's worth investigating.

Note that for the purposes of my question, "narrative control" is distinct from FATE's mechanic of "intentionally let bad stuff happen to your character to get more narrative control points".

Also,

I personally reject it because, like the Magic Item Mart Gift Card class feature, it's just a way for people to live in denial about their paradigm.

This statement doesn't make any sense. If the paradigm they choose is substandard, and there's a benefit which makes it not substandard, how is that denial? I agree that the Magic Item Mart Gift Card idea is terrible, but it's terrible for very distinct reasons which have nothing to do with the core viability of the class paradigm.

echo

[virgil]

Couldn't this be accomplished by giving warrior-types higher saves, more rerolls, and other "overcome the odds" type bonuses? Dresden Files RPG does this by assigning each character a fixed amount of "narrative influence" (Refresh) which takes various forms - spells for spellcasters, ad-hoc bonuses and rerolls for mortals, and weird powers for monster-race characters. I'm not personally advocating this idea - I'm in the camp of "get magic, already". But I think it's worth investigating.

Note that for the purposes of my question, "narrative control" is distinct from FATE's mechanic of "intentionally let bad stuff happen to your character to get more narrative control points".

I've considered the higher saves and such too, but that's not really giving them narrative control, so much as giving them bigger bonuses to what they already do. Most of it is just increased defense on top of that, which is a distinctly reactive concept.

Being Mr Immortal does not make you relevant if you do anything while you sit there unscathed.

[Username17]

Being really tough does not make you overcome the odds. It makes the odds more in your favor to begin with. That is the essential Elensar problem: it is actually unlikely that you personally will succeed where it is likely for you to fail. Everyone can't be above average. It's simply tautologically true. People who want their characters to overcome impossible odds actually want to be lied to - because there is no way to give them that on a fair die roll. By definition.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, how can we make the odds better than they look?