Martials Need Time: Low Level Magic

[TarkisFlux]

6th level martial characters can -and they can contribute in level-appropriate adventures, as long as they're not core Fighters who have all their non-combat competencies surgically removed.

There is a substantial difference between martial characters and mundane characters. Everything Beowulf does in the story is martial, but absolutely none of it is mundane. If you want to give him a bunch of supernatural class features because he's level 6 now and everyone above level 4 (or whatever) gets a bunch of supernatural class features, that's fine. But don't you dare call that shit mundane. Stop using those words interchangeably.

[MGuy]

I agree with lago 'basically'. Coddling people who like plain fighters isn't going to do any good. Let them opt to suck if they want but the better thing to do is just to make all the classes functional at all levels of play. From what I've seen 'this' board is probably the most sane when it comes to the Fighter issue. Every other board where this kind of thing comes up has the same bad arguments whenever the Fighter issue comes up. I think that trying to make them feel better about their poor choice actually helps reinforce their terribly blind beliefs.

[DSMatticus]

Dean is making two distinct complaints, both of which are pretty reasonable complaints to make (unless you're Lago, because this thread is all up on his badwrongfun buttons, but whatever):
1) By the time a mundane murder machine looks anything like comparable heroes in the fiction, he is already an obsolete character. It is genuinely fucking stupid that you need to retire your character before you can make the unimpressive boast that you're one of the less impressive depictions of Conan.
2) The only thing that looks like a D&D wizard is a D&D wizard. In most stories, especially ones featuring mundane murder machines as important participants, spellcasters do not have a staggering variety of abilities available to them and flashy room-clearers are usually the mark of a badass.

The solution to #1 is to front-load attack/defense progression such that low-level characters make it to badassdom before they retire. A level 5 Conan really should be able to cut down a truly impressive number of orcs, because at level 6 Conan needs to discover his divine origins and digivolve into Hercules. Also replace all the melee classes with varieties of warblade, because not having abilities is lame.

The solution to #2 is warlocks/less-varied-but-more-usage spherelocks, with more versatile and powerful caster classes being things you prestige into for your sixth level. A low-level caster has an at-will magical attack on par with a mundane weapon and a handful of reliable tricks centered around a common theme. Roll clerics/paladins together and make them more like warblades than warlocks. Druids get the warlock treatment, but instead of having a magical attack they get to hulk out or whatever with animal forms.

[PhoneLobster]

I dunno, I'm pretty sure for all the prevaricating and tangents Dean's entire "point" devolves to the very familiar...

"Oh hey, I just had this BRILLIANT idea that would solve problems or something! WHAT IF... Gritty Low Magic D&D! Here are my poorly thought out gritty low magic ideas for my poorly thought out gritty low magic solution that is no different from the ten thousand other gritty low magic brain storms produced by dumb asses every single day since the invention of D&D."

This isn't even close to new. We've seen it before, we will see it again, it's hardly even worth commenting on.

[erik]

For what it's worth on the Allip...
In living greyhawk they had "intro" adventures that were level 1 characters only. The highest CR allowed for these was 3, and yes, I played one where we fought an allip.

My recommended starting equipment almost always included these:
* scroll and/or oil of magic weapon
* scroll and/or potion of cure light wound

As it turns out, these help handle an Allip nicely enough.

I don't recall the exact details of the battle but we kicked its ass pretty handily. I know I had a halfling ranger and my wife had a sun domain cleric, but we didn't win by turning it. Beat it down with magic weapon and CLW's mostly I reckon. I think the less useful (and non-hypnotized) characters spent their actions flanking/aiding another while my wife and I and one other person who had magic weapon wailed on it. We took a little wisdom damage but nothing scary since we hurt it faster than it could heal. Maybe someone else had some holy water, I dunno.

The fight could have gone bad for plenty of parties. I think they presented an opportunity to buy oil of magic weapon or holy water earlier in the adventure, but my wife and I were already equipped... the hint might've helped one or two other people at our table tho.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The solution to #1 is to front-load attack/defense progression such that low-level characters make it to badassdom before they retire. A level 5 Conan really should be able to cut down a truly impressive number of orcs, because at level 6 Conan needs to discover his divine origins and digivolve into Hercules.

Here's the problem, DSMatticus: Level 5 Conan is already a narratively incoherent pile of shit. He's a preternatural but mundane mortal who can take on 30 trained but not elite 1st-level warriors (according to his genre archetype, anyway) in melee with no special tactical considerations. Right now Conan and similar characters are existing in this weird continuum of not being badass enough to to advance the plot as a mundane without DM fellatio but badass enough to do things mundanes can't do.

The switchover point should've already happened. His divine ascension or special Cimmerian blood or whatever should've kicked in -- if we're using 3E D&D as our straw model -- as soon as he hit level 4, max. His character is already a Captain Hobo-style contradiction and putting off doomsday will only make the problem worse.

[Schleiermacher]

There is a substantial difference between martial characters and mundane characters. Everything Beowulf does in the story is martial, but absolutely none of it is mundane. If you want to give him a bunch of supernatural class features because he's level 6 now and everyone above level 4 (or whatever) gets a bunch of supernatural class features, that's fine. But don't you dare call that shit mundane. Stop using those words interchangeably.

Okay, you're absolutely right. I was very imprecise. For clarity I should have been saying VAH but I didn't because that didn't flow nearly as well.

Beowulf is martial, he is not mundane, but he is a VAH. He doesn't have holy magic or nature magic or rage spirit magic or what have you -he's a Charles Atlas VAH, and so is Conan. But Charles Atlas only gets you so far before the suspension of disbelief breaks down. (Unlike Lago, I think it handily extends to killing 30 men in a stand-up fight because you're Just That Badass, but that is a matter of taste.) I think it seems unnecessarily convoluted to give martial characters two separate power-up sequences over the course of a campaign though, where they first get explicitly supernatural Charles Atlas VAH Powers and then later turn into Dragon Knights and get more distinctive magic. D&D has Extraordinary abilities and statistic increase on level-up for a reason -the VAHs can run on that until level 6, getting Charles Atlas abilities that are non-supernatural in-fiction if not by our metrics, and then get a power boost and stop being either VAHs or mundane in any sense.

That clearer?

[DSMatticus]

I do not give a fuck about your realizarm. When we say Conan is "mundane," we do not mean he is an ordinary human in an ordinary world. We mean he doesn't have an explicit supernatural power source. Those are distinct concepts. There is a lot of room for characters to do things that are impossible for real people in the real world without exposing some underlying magical nature, and the number of fantasy stories that occur in that space is fuck-off huge.

Conan needs to digivolve when the problems start being shit like "your opponent is a skyscraper" or "your opponent is intangible" or "the enemy's castle is over there on that cloud" or "the air here is made out of fire." He doesn't need to digivolve when the opponent is "two dozen orcs." Because two dozen orcs is exactly the sort of problem that can be solved by completely ordinary stabbings performed with unrealistic prowess, whereas none of those other problems can be solved by an application of unrealistic prowess at some mundane task (for definitions of unrealistic still short of "jump-powered flight," at least).

[Dogbert]

Conan needs to digivolve when the problems start being shit like "your opponent is a skyscraper" or "your opponent is intangible" or "the enemy's castle is over there on that cloud" or "the air here is made out of fire." He doesn't need to digivolve when the opponent is "two dozen orcs."

Except we're talking about d&d, and "your opponent is intangible"/"the enemy's castle is over there on that cloud" becomes bread and butter from the midgame up, so starting this point one out of two things is happening:

1) The muggle's contribution to the adventure is twofold: Jack and Shit (and Jack is out of town).
2) The GM is coddling his VAH with conspicuously opportune loot and MTP solutions to pull the wool over their eyes, case in which the muggle is still contributing jackshit to the adventure because the GM is the one solving the VAH's problems for them.

So, unless the OP's solution to "the muggle is useless in d&d fantasy" is "stop playing d&d fantasy and let's do Torchbearer instead" then sooner rather than later Conan needs to digivolve, muggle fanwank be damned.

[ETortoise]

Outside of combat, Conan is also a skilled infiltrator and survivalist. He also is routinely able to seduce female NPCs and charm or impress males into being his ally. These skills can meaningfully contribute to a lot of challenges.

[Dogbert]

Outside of combat, Conan is also a skilled infiltrator and survivalist. He also is routinely able to seduce female NPCs and charm or impress males into being his ally. These skills can meaningfully contribute to a lot of challenges.

Okay, then let's see Conan sneak past a BEHOLDER. What about survive in THE ELEMENTAL PLANE OF FIRE? Oh wait, he sure can impress the GMPC who was going to solve his problems for him anyway...

Please, stop drinking it. Wrong game.

P.D: No, Conan never seduced anyone. He gives or takes, but "seduction" is on a level of social subtlety he finds abhorring. Please read the books.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Being able to stomp crowds of mooks is a fine endgame for the Dirt Farmer tier, as long as the orcs can tap into the same resource to make the orcish Lu Bu come after Conan. Having Orc Lu Bu laugh off crowds of hirelings is a good way to bury the whole "high level mundanes command armies" argument too.

[LeadPal]

I'm not convinced Conan is viable at level 5, even if he's a match for fifty orcs. Instead of just orcs, he could be fighting locust swarms or an invisible archer. Even at low levels there are plenty of encounters that give VAHs trouble, and it isn't acceptable to water those encounters down. How does he contribute without explicit powers or mandatory items?

[Schleiermacher]

Outside of combat, Conan is also a skilled infiltrator and survivalist. He also is routinely able to seduce female NPCs and charm or impress males into being his ally. These skills can meaningfully contribute to a lot of challenges.

Okay, then let's see Conan sneak past a BEHOLDER. What about survive in THE ELEMENTAL PLANE OF FIRE? Oh wait, he sure can impress the GMPC who was going to solve his problems for him anyway...

I'm pretty sure that nobody has said that Conan can or should do those things -we just want Conan to sneak past an evil giant and survive in the frozen wastes of Cimmeria and the parched Valley of Death -which, you know, he does all the time.

[name_here]

I'm not convinced Conan is viable at level 5, even if he's a match for fifty orcs. Instead of just orcs, he could be fighting locust swarms or an invisible archer. Even at low levels there are plenty of encounters that give VAHs trouble, and it isn't acceptable to water those encounters down. How does he contribute without explicit powers or mandatory items?

Well, he probably deals with the locust swarm by flinging flaming oil or the dust of the black lotus at it, and the archer fires one arrow and is no longer invisible on account of not being at least seventh level in a full-casting class.

[DSMatticus]

Conan needs to digivolve when the problems start being shit like "your opponent is a skyscraper" or "your opponent is intangible" or "the enemy's castle is over there on that cloud" or "the air here is made out of fire." He doesn't need to digivolve when the opponent is "two dozen orcs."

Except we're talking about d&d, and "your opponent is intangible"/"the enemy's castle is over there on that cloud" becomes bread and butter from the midgame up, so starting this point one out of two things is happening:

1) The muggle's contribution to the adventure is twofold: Jack and Shit (and Jack is out of town).
2) The GM is coddling his VAH with conspicuously opportune loot and MTP solutions to pull the wool over their eyes, case in which the muggle is still contributing jackshit to the adventure because the GM is the one solving the VAH's problems for them.

So, unless the OP's solution to "the muggle is useless in d&d fantasy" is "stop playing d&d fantasy and let's do Torchbearer instead" then sooner rather than later Conan needs to digivolve, muggle fanwank be damned.

I do not think you are really reading this thread. I think you are just using it as an excuse to shout from the hilltops that "dude who is good with a sword" is not a high-level concept. No shit. Zero people in this thread are talking about what you are trying to talk about. I don't think there's a single person left at TGD afflicted with the "no, fighters are totally balanced" stupidity.

Here is what people are actually trying to discuss: there is a certain level X at which a mundane murder machine might look like something from your generic low-powered fantasy story. There is a level Y at which mundane murder machines will go obsolete and stop being able to contribute to adventures in a hypothetical D&D-like TTRPG. And the pertinent questions to this thread are "Y happens before X. Wat do?" and "what should spellcasters in the 1-X range look like to better emulate the genre?" Cause, let's be honest, there are very few spellcasters in non-D&D fantasy stories who look like wizards do, and that is particularly noticeable in the sorts of stories low-level D&D might otherwise emulate, where the almost total lack of specialization implied by D&D wizardry is pretty damn rare.

[Josh_Kablack]

I literally don't know who half of those guys are. Of those I do know, Aang and Street Fighter Ryu are definitely higher than 4th level.

So, your argument is personal ignorance and misrepresentation of levels? That's the opposite of convincing.

[Dean]

But none of this addresses what the pointy hat will be doing in combat.... if they're swording it up with everyone else as an alternative, they don't feel much like a pointy hat.

They will feel like the definitive pointy hat. The man that that term originates from fights like this:



Low fantasy wizards fight by stabbing and clubbing people just like everybody else at low level. The fact that they do magic in general does not equate them shooting lightning and fire as the norm. It would be under this paradigm, the paradigm we see in the genres D&D is trying to emulate, that the skilled swordsman would have a balanced place. The caster would fight like everyone else, dedicated martials would be able to do it better but wouldn't be able to speak to the dead so they both would value each others ability set.

I say that we need to force D&D groups to metamorphically yet regularly have the experience of personally shotgunning Old Yeller in the ballsack ditching Madmartigan in the inn/burning Conan's contract in front of him and replacing him on the spot with Harry Potter

Lago it should be obvious given how much time you think about marketing D&D that your plan to tell people what they can want is a garbage platform. It's an emotional overreaction caused by years of arguing against grognards, and I get that cause I had to do it too, but taking a wrong argument and inverting it is a bad way to mold your beliefs. Republican's hating abortion access doesn't make universal mandatory abortions a good idea. People want things out of their fantasy gaming experience and the quality of that experience is easily measured by how well it meets those expectations.

Dean is making two distinct complaints...

I am making those two and a third, that a d20 system like D&D is fully capable of delivering playspace where VAH’s are viable options as well as playspace where powerful Wizards are viable options they should just be separate spaces. By altering early casters and monsters to fit with a low fantasy theme and then altering mid game martials to fit a high fantasy theme you could create a game which could more legitimately claim to be a kitchen sink system by being able to emulate much more of the genre than before. The D&D world is high magic on a level that is almost unprecedented in fantasy and it is not necessary or beneficial for that to be true for all 20 levels. It could and should change as you played in different level ranges to look something like this.

Tier 1: Gritty Fantasy (Game of Thrones): Should be levels 1-5, is nowhere.
Characters here are just human but possess some training at badass things like swordfighting or thievery. Casters here should be the sort of subtle magic users that I was discussing. Mass enemies should be things like wolves or goblins and high end enemies should be things like Uruk Hai and Knights

Tier 2: Low Magic Fantasy (Lord of the Rings/Conan): Should be levels 6-10, is levels 1-4.
Characters here are at the peak of what is possible for Humans, they are as good at archery or stealth or tactics that it is possible for humans to be. Casters here should be Conan d20 style. Where they can do recognizable magic but it’s the sort of thing that generally has some start up time or is otherwise small and utilitarian. Mass enemies here should be Orcs and fightan mans of various kinds and high end enemies should be Trolls, Ogres, and Minotaurs.

Tier 3: High Magic Fantasy (Avatar The Last Airbender/D&D): Should be levels 11-15, is level 5-10
Everyone here is magic. Even if they’re supposedly not they’re just Rock Lee who has not-magic magic. Casters here are just casters in the sense we know them. They can just throw fire if they fucking feel like it and when they want to get somewhere they can fucking fly if they like too. This is where martials really need to evolve but considering they’ve already had a chance to be a Pirate who turned into a Pirate King already it is much more reasonable to ask them to become the Lord of all Pirate Souls, whereas before there was no time for evolution because their concept was obviated almost as soon as they began playing. Mass enemies here are things like Vampires and Harpies and big enemies are Dragons and Cloud Giants

Tier 4: Superheroic Fantasy (Dragonball Z): Should be levels 16-20, is levels 11-14 before the game completely stops functioning which happens around level 15.
Characters here all possess a wide variety of powerful magical abilities like AOE attacks, flight, invulnerability, and teleportation. Casters here should actually be less fiddly than in D&D with powerful at-will abilities given to them much more liberally. There’s no need to make a top tier character declare that they’re stoneskinned for the next 2 and a half hours, they can jus have stone skin now. Martials at this point are the sort that stop time and can’t be killed with hp damage and shit. Mass enemies are most of the cool demons and big enemies are Balors and Ancient Dragons.

[infected slut princess]

Fuck you Lago. Conan is a narratively incoherent pile of shit at level 1. As soon as he starts the game, he needs to have his divine ascension or Cimmerian super blood kick in. Anything less is Captain Hobo fucktardery.

[TarkisFlux]

You know, I just should have read your initial post more carefully, because...

Magic in combat time has no place here because mages at this level are expected to fight with swords and staves just like everyone else.

... is a thing you said at the start. Sorry for having made you repeat it.

And on that note, I'm out.

[name_here]

I literally don't know who half of those guys are. Of those I do know, Aang and Street Fighter Ryu are definitely higher than 4th level.

So, your argument is personal ignorance and misrepresentation of levels? That's the opposite of convincing.

When discussing icons, people not recognizing names does matter. And I also seriously question the idea that Aang and Archer are fourth level.

[PhoneLobster]

... Gritty Fantasy ... Low Magic Fantasy...

Yep. I pretty much called it.

It's been done, it is the go to choice of ignorant dumb fuck GMs with their first set of hideously painful and punitively anti player home brew rules. It has always been that.

Introducing Low Magic principles be it as a setting, a painfully needless tier or two half the size (the first half people ever play) of your entire campaign or as anything else has never ever solved any of the problems of D&D ever.

Just trying to say "fuck you you guys can't have nice things, no NONE of you can have nice things" doesn't help the game and we have decades of failed gritty low fantasy house rule fuck ups to prove it.

I'm sorry but it's been done to death and has only EVER made things WORSE for the game. As largely demonstrated by how dumb your specific implementation ideas are.

[OgreBattle]

Okay, then let's see Conan sneak past a BEHOLDER

Conan's mighty muscles flexed as he pulled back the mighty sinews of the hyrkanian warbow and let loose a thick penetrating shaft deep into the pink flesh of the many eyed orb. "By Crom!" Conan ejaculated.

What about survive in THE ELEMENTAL PLANE OF FIRE?

Conan's mighty muscles flexed as his rough bronzed hands slathered the thick goop of the chill worm over his bronzed body. "By Crom!" Conan ejaculated.

---

What I mean by that is that I enjoy fantasy settings where fantasy stuff is everywhere. Just as silver in reality is just a metal but in D&D it's a slayer of lunar phase animal people, having various 'magical materials' that hero guys who don't wear pointy hats can use is also cool.

This thread is just a repeat of everything else that has been said many thousands of times over in fighter/wizard disparity threads though, I mostly wanted to write Conan lines.

[DSMatticus]

Dedicating half the game to the adventures of "normal dude with sword" is fucking crazy. There is not enough conceptual space in a Conan story to make it worth two entire Naruto's or two entire Dragon Ball Z's. The idea that spellcasting is a thing that for all intents and purposes begins at level 6 (and then sucks) is fucking crazy. Having every single character be a dude who stabs things is boring as shit, and balancing magic's non-combat utility by having the people who use it be worse at stabbing things is a shamefully bad idea.

What you want is apparently a Shadowrun hack with really shitty equipment and really shitty magic. If you only care about modelling the spectrum of human competency, you should use a diepool system. If you want people to drink performance-enhancing tea and draw squiggly lines on shit for fiddly bonuses, that's your equipment section. Finally, scrap the magic section entirely and replace it with a couple of magic tiers with their own spell lists. Starting characters are always tier 1 and tier 1 is a bunch of cheap spells that suck and satisfy whatever thematic requirements you personally have in mind.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Because two dozen orcs is exactly the sort of problem that can be solved by completely ordinary stabbings performed with unrealistic prowess, whereas none of those other problems can be solved by an application of unrealistic prowess at some mundane task (for definitions of unrealistic still short of "jump-powered flight," at least).

For the sake of argument, sure. Conan can kill two dozen orcs as a mundane character without violating his idiom or breaking the fourth wall. Now tell me why this character concept shouldn't top out at a metaphorical level 3/campaign prologue. What genre or gameplay imperative do we have that states just because a pre-ascension's Conan feats of badassery includes slaying a contingent of castle guards means that he can take on an ogre or a dire tiger or a flesh golem?