The reason why fighters will never have nice things.

[Username17]

More importantly though, I honestly don't believe that anyone who would actually design a game with world interaction and player narrative powers and market it would completely leave out save-or-suck or save-or-die powers, even if that was an actual goal.

True. 4e was sold as the "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" version of D&D, and it still had Sleep in the very first book, which was and is the "Lol: You Lose" power that does not damage.

-Username17

[ScottS]

Not directly related to the DMF issue but responding to side points above:

a) "Forced diversity" (e.g. forcing someone to play the cleric) isn't entirely bad, if it leads to more interesting parties and/or prevents stupid-party-build tricks (4 fighters + 1 warlord in 4e and such).

b) Certain classes being completely useless in certain situations isn't entirely bad, if it gives PCs a more compelling reason to "need each other" and if the "moments to shine" are kept relatively even.

[Jilocasin]

Not directly related to the DMF issue but responding to side points above:

a) "Forced diversity" (e.g. forcing someone to play the cleric) isn't entirely bad, if it leads to more interesting parties and/or prevents stupid-party-build tricks (4 fighters + 1 warlord in 4e and such).

Disagree. Players should be able to play pretty much whatever concept they want without worrying about having a "necessary" class. And the 4E problem was because there were only 13 different actual effects and most classes suffered from self-synergy.

b) Certain classes being completely useless in certain situations isn't entirely bad, if it gives PCs a more compelling reason to "need each other" and if the "moments to shine" are kept relatively even.

Disagree. Sometimes having lesser efficacy can be okay but complete uselessness leads to mentally checking out or leaving the room and playing smash.

[Juton]

The reason that the 4 person iconic party is so enshrined is that there was a certain amount of grunt work that a party needs to do and the iconic party is a way of spreading across all members. No one wants to be just a healbot, trapmonkey, tank or utility caster. I guess getting people to volunteer to be clerics in 2e was such a hassle that they went overboard in 3.5. If you allow everyone in the group to handle the 'bitch jobs', or remove them from the game then party composition doesn't matter. 4e largely removed them from the game, lets try the other way.

[Lokathor]

So then would people be okay with the fighter knowing how to bandage wounds and such to heal people out of combat?

Would the fighter counter traps by simply activating them and then sundering whatever comes out to get him into small pieces?

Would the grognards we're trying to keep happy be okay with these kinds of things if they were put in? I don't think so myself, but how much do we care about keeping them happy anyways?

[Jilocasin]

We're trying to keep the grognards happy? That's news to me.

[Lokathor]

Well if we don't care about them we can just make all fighters into Transcendental Warriors and call it a day.

[Juton]

The grognards are never happy, not at first. If you make a game that is good enough eventually they'll stop their bitching and play.

[Roy]

Not directly related to the DMF issue but responding to side points above:

a) "Forced diversity" (e.g. forcing someone to play the cleric) isn't entirely bad, if it leads to more interesting parties and/or prevents stupid-party-build tricks (4 fighters + 1 warlord in 4e and such).

b) Certain classes being completely useless in certain situations isn't entirely bad, if it gives PCs a more compelling reason to "need each other" and if the "moments to shine" are kept relatively even.

Fail.

Stupid party build tricks like the one you described only exist when everyone is so similar anyways, you have nowhere to go but up (as opposed to out). So you stack the same thing together and spam the same trick and no one can counter it. If you do have that problem you have far worse problems. But forcing people to play something else in no way addresses this, and is in no way a good thing.

Some classes being shut off is exactly what 3.5 tried to do. A trap comes up, so everyone sits back while the Rogue deals with it. Then undead come up, and it's the Rogue's turn on Smash Brothers.

Anything that encourages players to disengage from your game is encouraging them to not play your game. You want people to play the thing they're buying, yes? Because if not, they don't buy it.

[ScottS]

I'd say it's an unstated goal with these games that not only do you want to give people a large "toolbox" so they can build a large variety of characters/types, but you actually want everyone at the table playing different stuff. You can rely somewhat on different people's notions of cool to end up with a diverse group, but unless you specifically bribe/force them to do it (via niche protection or whatever), it's not necessarily going to happen. If you run a superhero game and everyone winds up playing barely distinct versions of Superman, would you say that's fine since "everyone's happy", or would you wonder whether there's a problem some place (either a table-wide "failure of imagination", or else something broken in your RPG that makes people want to take that character type because it breaks the game)? I don't really like/read comics, so that may be a bad example (e.g. there might be a "Magnificent Seven Supermen" series or something), but I guess the 3e analog would be everyone playing full-CL prep-casters after some point, everyone playing Drizzt, or whatever.

Regarding PCs being useless occasionally, I'd probably extend the above argument by saying that forcing characters to have holes in their skill/ability set automatically leads to diverse parties. Really, though, I want to ask about the whole "every PC must be actively rolling dice for something at all times, otherwise they get bored and leave" idea. I think you guys are really overstating the case. I don't automatically get offended/huffy/whatever if the GM feels the need to have single PCs "do a little soloing", especially if it makes sense in the story. In other words, I guess I'm OK with PCs having strongly non-overlapping skill/power sets, and the immediate consequence of "having to sit out" every once in a while, because I'm also OK with some amount of passivity in the service of keeping things "realistic". I'd rather not have the story be twisted in knots just so everyone can be kept occupied 100% of the time. I'd rather the game not treat me like I have ADHD.

[Parthenon]

Green Lantern Corps and especially the Sinestro war- almost everyone and everything on both sides of the conflict had magic rings. That Nova corps had a similar thing, but almost everyone died about the time of Civil War anyway. To some extent the Metal Men (robots, each made from a different metal). How different are the powers of Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Batwoman (the lesbian redo), Batgirl (original), Huntress, etc?

[mean_liar]

I agree with ScottS.

There are some minigames that are common enough that you want everyone to have a chance at it, and there are others where you want the characters to feel special because they have something the others don't.

The trick is balancing the various schticks such that they're nominally equal, so that "the spellcaster does everything" is not a viable answer to whatever problem happens to be facing the group. Ultimately that means limiting the power of spellcasters from what we saw in DnDv3/3.5.

[Neurosis]

A lot of your complaints with 3.5E seem to have been addressed in 4E.

Why then do you all hate 4E?

[Username17]

A lot of your complaints with 3.5E seem to have been addressed in 4E.

Why then do you all hate 4E?

Because it sucks.

-Username17

[Ice9]

4E sucks all the more because it had many good ideas, and managed to screw them up.

Good Idea: Putting everyone on the same power schedule
Bad Idea: The schedule is so sparse you end up spamming two at-will powers much of the time.

Good Idea: Turn non-combat magic into rituals that any class can access.
Bad Idea: The rituals cost too much, take too long, and do too little.

Good Idea: Give martial characters powers, constructed the same way as magic ones.
Bad Idea: Almost all the powers are boring, some are even useless.

Good Idea: Keep people on the RNG
Bad Idea: Do the math wrong so you don't actually stay on the RNG

Good Idea: Have different 'tiers' of play, with a clear concept what people will be doing/facing in each tier.
Bad Idea: Eliminate any plot-affecting ability on the PCs part, so that the higher tiers are pretty much the same thing with bigger numbers.

[Lago PARANOIA]

C'mon, Ice9, you didn't even scratch the surface.

Good Idea: Make skills diverge less from each other so that someone who makes a decent investment in, say, Stealth at low levels doesn't lose the ability later on.
Bad Implementation: Make stats and skill bonuses diverge so that you lose it anyway.

Good Idea: Implement a subsystem so that when there's a broad challenge like 'escape the zombie-infested town' or 'find the hidden temple', everyone gets a turn and you aren't just watching one person roll the dice.
Bad Implementation: Punish anyone but the tweaked-out minmaxxer for taking a turn, watch one person roll all of the dice anyway.

Good Idea: Have transformative tiers where the game undergoes a fundamental shift in its attitude and playstyle.
Bad Implementation: Only make the powers and feats a mild upgrade from the previous tier, so that the ballyhooed transformation is all a lie.

Good Idea: Strip out all of the unnecessary crap from monsters so that DMs don't have to do as much work as before.
Bad Implementation: Make the monster stats so arbitrary that most of the monsters feel too much alike. There are some outliers here and there like a Beholder which will definitely feel different than the others, but these are rare.

Good Idea: Implement a broad 'role' system so that new players to the game have an idea how to be useful and also make it so that people don't step on each others' toes.
Bad Implementation: Make the roles very unevenly powerful at certain points of play. A diverse team of leaders (runepriest, 2 battle clerics, 2 bravura warlords) are godly at low levels; a diverse team of controllers (some combination of wizards, druids, invokers, and a laser cleric or two) are godly at high levels. Furthermore fail to realize that 'more DPR' is not a role and that the reptilian cortex of the typical player's brain that demands quick satisfaction means that most groups have an unbalanced ratio of strikers.

Good Idea: Assign monster roles so that a DM can quickly and easily put together challenging encounters with a wide variety of tactics.
Bad Implementation: In addition to the above problem, monster roles are too ephemeral and some of the monster roles are just flat-out better than the others (soldiers and leaders artificially add difficulty, skirmishers artificially lower difficulty, etc.)

Good Idea: Eliminate the Christmas Tree Effect by eliminating diverse bonuses and causing people to bling out their 17th level characters with various 4th level gear.
Bad Implementation: Make gear so pricey that it's oftentimes the only choice. Moreover, completely lose your discipline less than half of a year in and implement slot bonuses anyway.

Good Idea: Get rid of wealth-by-level, replace with something more sane.
Bad Implementation: Replace with something significantly more insane than wealth-by-level.

Good Idea: Remove game-breaking craziness from the game like Wish Loops, Simacrulum Armies, Phoenix Duplication, etc.. which was mostly the effect of not deconstructing high-level spells fully.
Bad Implementation: Strip out anything potentially game-breaking or versatile from the rules, making high-level powers functionally identical to low-level ones.

Good Idea: Eliminate the 5 minute workday by putting everyone on the same schedule and giving them incentives to continue.
Bad Implementation: Reinforce the 5-minute workday to an extent not even seen in 3E by increasing the amount of kick-ass one-shot powers and making action points/magical item dailies come back too slowly.

Good Idea: Eliminate people being blinged up with like 20 different magical item powers, making their characters confusing and overpowered.
Bad Implementation: Magical item dailies make over 90% of the equipment in the game trash drops.
Bad Implementation 2: Essentials realizes this and overhauls the magical item system so that magical item dailies are significantly less useless. But then forbids players from selecting more than 90% of the items anyway without fellating the DM. Counts as a 'fix' if the only thing you get over the course of the game are trash drops and you're forced to pick one I suppose.

Good Idea?: Make the effect of race more meaningful than in 3E increasing the amount of race-specific options in 4E. Actually, I think this is one of the worst ideas 4E ever got and I hate the idea of race being meaningful past level 3, because I fucking hate the idea of my goblin never becoming a great samurai no matter how hard he tries, but I could see where they were going with this.
Bad Implementation: Make the racial bonuses so big that the vast majority of races are a bad fit for a class. So instead of having an array of 8 different, unique fighters with their own strengths and weaknesses, they told fighter races without a bonus to STR and WIS/CON/or DEX to fuck off.

Good Idea: Realize that in 3E, feats didn't do enough for how little of them that you got. And of course people love the idea of customizing their characters to be different from other fighters. So everyone gets more feats!
Bad Implementation: Make feats universally weaker, so that you notice them less. Seriously, weapon focus is like in the top five of heroic tier feats and how often do non-number crunchers appreciate it? Not to mention filling up the game with trash feats and also implementing feat taxes so that people feel like they have less room to expand than even in 3E.


There are others that I'm missing, like the pile of whore's shit that is disassociated mechanics, the classplosion, multiclassing, the NADs armrace, healing surges, paragon and epic destinies, and so forth. But you get the idea.

Needless to say, even though 4E had a lot of ideas that we liked, you do not get any bonus points for shitty implementation!

[Fuchs]

That sums it up. When I heard what they wanted to do with 4E, I was very happy. When I saw what they actually did I hated it.

[mean_liar]

I agree with most of these, but there are a few ideas I wanted to continue to bat about.

Good Idea: Strip out all of the unnecessary crap from monsters so that DMs don't have to do as much work as before.
Bad Implementation: Make the monster stats so arbitrary that most of the monsters feel too much alike. There are some outliers here and there like a Beholder which will definitely feel different than the others, but these are rare.

I like how easy it is to put together a 4e adventure, and actually feel like the 3e creature features generally are even less diverse. It either hits for big damage, grapples, or uses one of the few top-tier spells for its level... or is generic.

Or is a nightmare to build.

I think there are enough Monster Manuals out now for 4e that you have enough to play with without feeling like everything is the same.

Good Idea?: Make the effect of race more meaningful than in 3E increasing the amount of race-specific options in 4E. Actually, I think this is one of the worst ideas 4E ever got and I hate the idea of race being meaningful past level 3, because I fucking hate the idea of my goblin never becoming a great samurai no matter how hard he tries, but I could see where they were going with this.
Bad Implementation: Make the racial bonuses so big that the vast majority of races are a bad fit for a class. So instead of having an array of 8 different, unique fighters with their own strengths and weaknesses, they told fighter races without a bonus to STR and WIS/CON/or DEX to fuck off.

I'm firmly in the camp of, "races should mean something". Halfling Brawlers should suck. Minotaur Lyricists should suck. Elven Barbarians should suck. I don't think that making every race/class combination viable (though for me I think of it in terms of race/schtick combination since I think effects-based is the way to go) is desirable; I want races to feel different.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If that's the case then the game should at least have the balls to tell you straight up that kobolds aren't allowed to be clerics rather than doing that half-and-half shit where you're allowed to play a sucky build.

Regardless, the idea of race meaning anything past the early levels is insulting Conan-grade shit. People trying to sneak in their low-level mentalities into the higher ones. Not to mention how retarded it is that Hercules 2.0 is stronger as an orc than a drow even though if you plot the curve of their strength the difference in the strength of a 'regular' orc and drow is meaningless compared to someone who took 10 levels in Juggernaut anyway.

[Sashi]

The problem with kobold clerics is the stat mods, the problem with Kobold barbarians is the stat mods and weapon damage penalty. If you remove the racial stat mods from the game, then suddenly Kobolds make great rogues, good ranged casters, OK melee anything, and sub-par barbarians or anything else that assumes giant weapons.

There will always be times that people try and play "sucky" builds like a halfling barbarian or Half Orc wizard, but the "suck" in those builds should be that the halfling can't use a greataxe and the Half Orc's racial burst damage ability is meaningless when you're inflicting status effects, not that they have "wasted" stat mods.

[Neurosis]

Well that was a very thorough answer. Thank you.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So anyway, how would you solve the problem of the DMF fucking things up for everyone?

Me, personally, I think it would be best to wait 5-6 years for anime and modern VG action heroes (like Kratos) to become entrenched enough in fan imagination that this useless piece of crap dies a slow and painful death.

If there was only some way to reveal the Batman Behind the Curtain...

The idea that someone can be a "pure" 20th level ANYTHING is pretty lame and stupid, and it's especially stupid for the Fighter, who can epitomize literally any kind of combat style that doesn't encompass magic.

Now I wouldn't say that. Wizard, for example, is an example of a class that actually scales very nicely from level 1 to 20 (1st year Harry Potter to Dr. Strange). Same for Monk. On the bottom range of the scale you have Hit-Girl, at the top end of the scale you have Kenshiro. Paladin, if the power issues were solved, would also scale very well.

The real problems come into play when you have classes that can scale for a large number of levels but not all of them. For example, the cleric. That class actually only makes sense up until level 18 or 19, then the concept becomes dumb. Bards run out of juice at around level 15, when they have too much overlap with wizards to stand out on their own. The 3E rogue has no real thematic reason to exist after around level 10 or so except for quirks in the mechanics.

The fighter sticks out because it stops being a useful archetype at a laughably low level. Level 5 about.

[A Man In Black]

If you run a superhero game and everyone winds up playing barely distinct versions of Superman, would you say that's fine since "everyone's happy", or would you wonder whether there's a problem some place (either a table-wide "failure of imagination", or else something broken in your RPG that makes people want to take that character type because it breaks the game)?

A superhero game should at least offer tools to accommodate mono-parties, since it's in-genre: Marvel Family, Batman and supporting characters, etc. That doesn't mean you necessarily want to encourage it in a fantasy game, but there are reasons to want to encourage it in a superhero game.

[Midnight_v]

I'm having a problem with some of this ... especially the part about the tomes etc.
Look at for example the tome series Samurai. Badass Melee fighter who actually has the commune with the ascestors power. You can actually push that to higher level shit if you really needed to.
The Tome fighter seems to be able to play at all levels, is that not true?

It seems to me that the op's problem with people who hate that the fighter become weeabo fightin man.
Well I'm kinda like ... wtf. You just can't appeal to everyone. Thats the problem you cannot appeal to everyone. period. It stupid to try. If someone says its okay for your mage to go from harry potter to Doc Strange but it violates thier WSoD then there's certainly a level of "Kiss my ass" that should come with your next response.
Oh and by the way a quick 3 badass normals off the top of my head would be. taskmaster, bullseye, and desthstroke the terminator.

I also note that most of the things that people talk about is
1. Travel
2. Various combat tricks.

1. On travel.

Whatever the fighter has to do to get the plane of shadow. Everyone else needs to have to do aslo. I really feel like to get the game that people expect on some level. You totaly HAVE to travel to one of the "Gates to the Outland" to get there.
Or it has to be a ritual that any 4 fucking people can do if they have the sacred scroll of cytorack and can read the old tongue. Its pretty much a no brainer.
Also if you're going to have the pally summon a gold dragon to ride on then we need to go back to the old rules of domestication.. 2nded I think. In which the fighter can force servitude out of said dragon after he kicks the shit out of it and spares its life. (of course it should prolly get a save for this) or whatever.

2. On combat and related things:

Lets say I sit down and I want my combat gimmick is "I blade all kinds of shit... to death". I should totally be able to do that. Not only should I be able to do that but I should do that well enough that it fucking matters. Frankly cause people are going to play the guy who swords shit down. No matter what.
I don't know if the phallic imagery makes em feel manly or whatever they're gonna do that, and it doesn't matter to some if its a feral death blow or a 10 full attack spread or, foil, foil, foil, epic attack. People want that to be there.
So the people who don't want fighters to have nice things are the ones that are wrong.
In the Zombilypse scenario. Where you want a fighter to stop the town from being zombied. ... people need to fucking read the zombie survival guide, and read world war z for these types of arguments really. Frankly cause before the zombie shit gets world wide there are really plenty of chances to stop it. People just totally fuck it up cause "the don't believe in zombies" in D&D everyone KNOWS there are fuckin zombies so the million man zombie army actually can be stamped out in its infancy.
IF NOT then the figther has to have to town construct a wall around itself, and tell them to close the gates and then he plays dynasty warriors for a thousand zombies or so, cleans himself up and give the town instructions on how to deal with zombie attacks ... in thier infancy.
If the fighter is faced with a gish making a magnitude 10 earthquake then he seriously has to have the option to kill that gish with extreme stabintaion in the combat minigame.
Alternatively, he has to be able to wreak the same amount of damage himself. In fact thats preferable. He's got to be allowed to kill a village or 2 in a few mins. .

Which I actually did come to think of with using this.

At 7th level, the critical threat range of any charge attack he makes, or any attack he makes against a flat-footed foe, increases by 1. (Thus, a greataxe would threaten a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20.) This ability stacks with the Improved Critical feat or the keen weapon enhancement.
At 10th level, the barbarian can make a single turn, up to 90 degrees, during a charge.
At 13th level, the barbarian can charge through squares occupied by his allies or by noncombatants.
At 16th level, the barbarian can move up to four times his speed when making a charge attack, rather than double.
At 19th level, the barbarian acquires a "cleaving charge." If he drops an opponent on a charge attack, and he has at least 10 feet of movement remaining, he can immediately make a new charge attack against a second foe. If he drops that foe and still has movement remaining, he can charge a third, and so on until he either fails to drop a foe, or runs out of movement. All the other standard rules for a charge attack still apply, including the fact that he must have at least 10 feet of distance to make the charge.

Some acf for barbarians from city scape but remember doing that and having so much fucking movement that I thought... ubercharging like this I could kill a whole village in a round. Which is no fucking different ultimately from the gish sticking his sword in the ground. . .
There used to be soooo much talk about balance, then 4th came out and it was balanced in to banality. Not enough people ever talked about what no one not npcs, not pcs. No one should be able to do. Scry and die. Hell scry and teleport for that matter. Gate. There indeed needs to be some of that stuff that everyone HAS to go through. Yes you have to throw the ring into the volcano, sure you can teleport there; teleport clearly reads you can teleport anywhere you've ever been. ... wait what? That way the story can proceed at least.

TL;DR
What is the real complaint here? I actually thought it was obvious to everyone that the "Fighter" goes from Punisher~Taskmaster~Wolverine~Hulk or doomsday or whatever @ level 20. If you're confronted with people who are logic impervious about such things, they're going to be that way about other things. Likely not who you should play with. Those people really DON'T want the fighter to contribute. Nothing you can do about that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Look at for example the tome series Samurai. Badass Melee fighter who actually has the commune with the ascestors power. You can actually push that to higher level shit if you really needed to.

Midnight_v, all of that shit is just number manipulation. I don't remember the samurai, but I do remember the fighter. And thematically that concept still peters out at around level 5. Seriously, without resorting to game rules or mechanical descriptions but only referencing stuff in the class, describe to me how a level 15 fighter is different from a level 5 fighter. Like you were writing a story in a book or filming a movie.