How do we get rid of the Fighter

[RadiantPhoenix]

yeah, i'd like to know that, too. i don't know of any protagonists without out-of-combat abilities.

Seriously.

Even Ichigo (blandy mcsword) has divination and mobility powers (although the former isn't used often, because his enemies now generally come to him).

[Kaelik]

Sure you can. Many protagonists in stories do so.

Like who?

yeah, i'd like to know that, too. i don't know of any protagonists without out-of-combat abilities.

Well... Ichigo. Unless you count the power of friendship. Because the only thing he does to advance the plot is kill the people he is told to kill by someone else.

[John Magnum]

Do you count the Marines in Aliens as protagonists? I don't think Hicks ever demonstrates any out-of-combat abilities.

[Midnight_v]

Yeah, i'd like to know that, too. i don't know of any protagonists without out-of-combat abilities.

They should have something they do beyond swording, I'm hard pressed to think of one, because that doesn't really make sense.
There aren't really stories feature guys who all they can do is "Sword" well there are but those guys are NOT the protagonist of the stories.
Even the people with the "I'm the best there is at what I do" do other shit when they're not all "Snikt, stab stab." thats why I always found the skill assignments for classes so unsatisfying in D&D. So...wait, I'm a barbarian so I can't take diplomacy... ever? Wtf?
I guess so... still


I think the tome guys could do it pretty well.

Even if they're not perfect, they're on the right track, for the archetype.

If they're really good at swording things, then allotting options for them to not suck outside of combat, shouldn't be beyond reach.

On another note... random ideas...

Since people keep mentioning 4th, having a mandatory, you are no longer playing as the fellowship of the ring, but now as the justice league... might have not been a bad idea. Same as with the 10 level knight class in the tome but well... everybody. Its stops a lot of bullshit, that we jerk hard and all night too, like "...distinctly low level concept..."
etc etc. It allows for a lot when at level "X" everyone is getting into new digs. Everything else about 4th kinda gargled cock though, not a bad concept for diffusing shit like this thread.

I'm too tired too do it right now but I want a tome skill feat for:

Spritual Journey

"It be dee, sauce Mon... it be openin' doors to other worlds..."
The use of this feat requires inhalation or ingestion of some materials
the cost for the materials is negligent unless noted otherwise.
Benefits: This is a skill feat that scales with your ranks in Survival.
-0 ranks: You can replace any Knowledge: Arcana, Dungeoneering , Geography, planes, Nature, or Religion check with a survival check.
-4 ranks: You gain a spirit animal guide. You can summon a spirit animal guide that only you can see and functions as the spells: Unseen servant, Comprehend languages, and locate object. (The animals is always chosen by the dm, because you can't always get what you want)
-9 ranks:
-14 ranks:
-19 ranks: You can planeshift as the spell. Using this feat in this way consumes 25gp in "incense", "ungents" "herbs" and/or "powders".

Since I'm pretty much happy with the "Tome Style" feat answers having skill feats that give you non combat shit to do works well form being the team player.

A friend of mine who in many ways can pass for a grognard, mentioned to me that, the worst thing they did was do away with non-weapon proficiencies instead of "making them relevant".
His argument was similar to many people here, "Its nothing to make a killing machine in D&D, but you should be able to make a character that is actually useful outside of combat without taking a serious hit to your character. A good example is how Money~power, so you (Midnight_v) will never buy a boat and be a pirate captain, even if you want to because its eating into that next +1 on your sword.... that just sucks from a story perspective"

The second part got a hard looking at with all the economic talk from the tomes onward. "3 or so economies".
The non-weapon profs. . . I had to look up, and I think that effective warriors can reach a level of effectiveness and take a skill feat here and there to represent that.
However, as long as a "Fighter" has to use every resource to do is job, then it'll be a problem.
Point: A tome fighter, Hell the tome barbarian, can actually afford to take skill feats, and be useful out of combat, if we increase the number of skill feats, and also supernatural feats. Mostly, because they don't "NEED" to Sword things with math any harder.
Though thankfully the option is till there if they want to be:
Kenpachi: "Tome barbarian"
etc.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Well... Ichigo. Unless you count the power of friendship. Because the only thing he does to advance the plot is kill the people he is told to kill by someone else.

Nope!

He has divination powers that let him find people (see: the ribbon thing near the very beginning of the series)

http://www.mangapanda.com/94-462-12/ble ... ter-8.html
http://www.mangapanda.com/94-462-13/ble ... ter-8.html

[Midnight_v]

Well... Ichigo. Unless you count the power of friendship. Because the only thing he does to advance the plot is kill the people he is told to kill by someone else.

Nope!

He has divination powers that let him find people (see: the ribbon thing near the very beginning of the series)

http://www.mangapanda.com/94-462-12/ble ... ter-8.html
http://www.mangapanda.com/94-462-13/ble ... ter-8.html

I had forgotten about that.
So yeah. . .
It must be pretty difficult to make a character that is efficient at killing with a sword, and who also can move the plot. Or perhaps it's only when people try to make a class that does that.

[Chamomile]

Do you count the Marines in Aliens as protagonists? I don't think Hicks ever demonstrates any out-of-combat abilities.

Keep in mind: Aliens is one adventure. While you could expand the concept of being stranded on a planet crawling with xenomorphs into a full-blown campaign (and probably one I would play), the actual movie Aliens is basically a single dungeon crawl.

[Drolyt]

It must be pretty difficult to make a character that is efficient at killing with a sword, and who also can move the plot. Or perhaps it's only when people try to make a class that does that.

To be fair it is much easier in a point based system. A lot of them even provide guidelines like "so many of your points should be spent on something other than killing things" (it isn't worded like that but you get the idea). D&D tried to solve it with skills (and non-weapon proficiencies before that) but it didn't work very well.
Edit: It occurs to me I didn't really explain my point. The problem is that there are a wide variety of noncombat abilities and most aren't really class specific. How do you implement that in a class and level system?

[John Magnum]

Drolyt you're really wide of the mark here. It's harder to enforce some minimum level of out-of-combat competence in a point-based system because people will do their best to spend as many of their points in combat effectiveness. It's easier in a level and class-based system because you can just write every level of every class such that it includes some out-of-combat utility, and therefore no matter what choice people make they're getting something.

[Drolyt]

Drolyt you're really wide of the mark here. It's harder to enforce some minimum level of out-of-combat competence in a point-based system because people will do their best to spend as many of their points in combat effectiveness. It's easier in a level and class-based system because you can just write every level of every class such that it includes some out-of-combat utility, and therefore no matter what choice people make they're getting something.

Your not wrong, you just don't see my point. Pick a random character from legend or literature who you would give the fighter class. What noncombat abilities does he have? Good. Now pick a different character who should fit into the fighter class. You'll want different nomcombat abilities right? It is easier to do that in point buy.

[zugschef]

Do you count the Marines in Aliens as protagonists? I don't think Hicks ever demonstrates any out-of-combat abilities.

the complete alien franchise (except maybe resurrection) has exactly one protagonist.

[Username17]

Drolyt you're really wide of the mark here. It's harder to enforce some minimum level of out-of-combat competence in a point-based system because people will do their best to spend as many of their points in combat effectiveness. It's easier in a level and class-based system because you can just write every level of every class such that it includes some out-of-combat utility, and therefore no matter what choice people make they're getting something.

Your not wrong, you just don't see my point. Pick a random character from legend or literature who you would give the fighter class. What noncombat abilities does he have? Good. Now pick a different character who should fit into the fighter class. You'll want different nomcombat abilities right? It is easier to do that in point buy.

No. You're still wrong. In a level based system, a character at level X has J selections from list N. If you want a different character to have different abilities from list N, you just do that. In point buy, you either have to give people N-Points that can only be used to purchase abilities from list N, or you accept that some non-zero number of players will want to spend their points on abilities on list C instead.

Getting everyone to have J non-combat abilities is by definition easier in a level based system because you can fiat the number of non-combat abilities each character has to have. A point buy system necessarily makes the design goal "everyone has J non-combat abilities" much more difficult to implement.

Point buy systems have various advantages, but getting people to all come to the table with rough parity in combat and non-combat applications is not among them.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Can I just say that AD&D, as released in 1978-1980, fixed a lot of the problems you guys are having here with Fighters and Wizards?

it also works under 2nd, if you take the time to adjust the spells down in power, like the monsters were, and use all the bits like %chance to learn spell and %chance of spell failure. They just didnt have time to adjust all the spells while wording them to make more sense after adjusting all the monsters down a bit, and the dragons up a bit.

so it was 77~88 that 1st was. it still all worked from 89~00 when you played the game right and didnt just throw out the checks and balances, and let people use Wizards Spell Compendium series as there personal spell books. ie when you dont purposefully break the game and then bitch about it being broken. IE acting like a fucking child!

it wasnt until 3rd when the pandering to players option started to remove those checks and balances, in line with the monstrosity that was PO:S&P and PO:S&M.

[Drolyt]

Drolyt you're really wide of the mark here. It's harder to enforce some minimum level of out-of-combat competence in a point-based system because people will do their best to spend as many of their points in combat effectiveness. It's easier in a level and class-based system because you can just write every level of every class such that it includes some out-of-combat utility, and therefore no matter what choice people make they're getting something.

Your not wrong, you just don't see my point. Pick a random character from legend or literature who you would give the fighter class. What noncombat abilities does he have? Good. Now pick a different character who should fit into the fighter class. You'll want different nomcombat abilities right? It is easier to do that in point buy.

No. You're still wrong. In a level based system, a character at level X has J selections from list N. If you want a different character to have different abilities from list N, you just do that. In point buy, you either have to give people N-Points that can only be used to purchase abilities from list N, or you accept that some non-zero number of players will want to spend their points on abilities on list C instead.

Getting everyone to have J non-combat abilities is by definition easier in a level based system because you can fiat the number of non-combat abilities each character has to have. A point buy system necessarily makes the design goal "everyone has J non-combat abilities" much more difficult to implement.

Point buy systems have various advantages, but getting people to all come to the table with rough parity in combat and non-combat applications is not among them.

-Username17

Sorry, I'm not explaining myself clearly. I was originally responding to

It must be pretty difficult to make a character that is efficient at killing with a sword, and who also can move the plot. Or perhaps it's only when people try to make a class that does that.

My point, poorly made, was that designing such a class is non-trivial. I didn't mean to imply that a point system was better than a class system with a functional noncombat system, only that it was easier to design. See, what was in my head was something more like "well, classes give fixed abilities. You can make some of those abilities pick and choose, but it isn't as simple as telling people to take whatever abilities they want". Except that still isn't quite right.

[RadiantPhoenix]

It must be pretty difficult to make a character that is efficient at killing with a sword, and who also can move the plot. Or perhaps it's only when people try to make a class that does that.

My point, poorly made, was that designing such a class is non-trivial. I didn't mean to imply that a point system was better than a class system with a functional noncombat system, only that it was easier to design. See, what was in my head was something more like "well, classes give fixed abilities. You can make some of those abilities pick and choose, but it isn't as simple as telling people to take whatever abilities they want". Except that still isn't quite right.

Right.

It's true that it is easier to make a bunch of things and say, "pick whatever you want," than it is to make classes that can do A and B. (Let A = Swing a sword well and let B = Contribute out of combat)

That said, the latter will give you characters that can do A and B, and the former will frequently not.

[Drolyt]

That said, the latter will give you characters that can do A and B, and the former will frequently not.

I never meant to suggest otherwise.

[Midnight_v]

The irony of all of this being... that I was being sarcastic. It actually "shouldn't" be hard to do things of that vein, even though people developing games seem to fail at it. .

Truth be told this "Lets get rid of the fighter" is fucking nonsense altogether. A good chunk of the classes that people want to mod are people whose main combat thing is "I'll beat your ass...etc" and who when they AREN'T doing that, are can actually do "OTHER things". So "all skills taken individually" make a certain amount of sense and always has to me because that's something that actually happens both in story and dare I say "In real life".

Though at that point we're talking about 1 dimensional characters which (casters) are functionally allowed to get around by saying "I do magic" and doing magic can replace every other thing anyone does.
That means that swording should be worth a damn and that the charcters be they rogue or barbarians should have access to plot moving powers, that don't have to be tied to vancian style magic at all. . .

... If your concern is what I've heard here before "They don't advance the story on their own".

As far as modeling our heroes... there was a whole thread on that a while ago, and its been one of my favorite threads on here for a long while. Minimal bitching, and someone actually doing something that people might benefit from.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52984
From that I figured I could make melee guys or even semi-melee guys from any story I wanted, based on the things that people on here had created, (not just frank, and k, but Koumei, almost anyone whose contribute) and those things would not suck.
Captain America, Jason Vorhees, and Conan; Ichigo, Ash ketchum, and Ash from the evil dead can be moded.

So if the characters we love & hate can be created and played I suspect that its a decent indicator that if I have a character in my head that I want to play then if the classes are written well then I can tell the stories I want without much bullshit.

The back ground track is about "high level play" and always lurks but its weird because most high level plots boil down to "stab them harder, and/or drive it away the earth" and/or "fetch Epic Maguffin". Which are stories worth telling but represent a small amount of stories throughout all of the genre. (Galactus only show's up occasionally, you know)

[Meikle641]

Do you count the Marines in Aliens as protagonists? I don't think Hicks ever demonstrates any out-of-combat abilities.

Well, they're able to search, salvage, do at least basic welding, are able to read blueprints, do basic first aid. Plus computer skills, right? Or was the last one just Bishop?

[Aryxbez]

"It be dee, sauce Mon... it be openin' doors to other worlds..." Props Midnight_v, I watched this a few days ago, and I assume that was what ye were quoting with that quasi-feat ye made up?

That aside, while sure, to some extent, can create the martial characters we want with the current rules (Tome helps). However as its nature, does not solve the issues, and basically just Jury Rigging till we can finally get something more suitable. Whole way [Tome] Fighter,and other applicable classes were handled, has been said in the past by Frank (at least) it's not how they should be handled "going forward". As in, the future of creating a more up to date Fantasy RPG, in both its ruleset, and source material (more people want to play their Kratos, and Ichigos, than Conan and King Arthur), fighter types should have a more defined Power Source. May have a large array of options for what that Powersource "is", but all the same, ye have one.

As for more concrete explanation why don't want to have [Tome] Fighter and like to exist as it does, it escapes me at the moment, and hopefully Frank or another can provide a more clear explanation than I. Also to contradict myself, I ask, what is wrong with the [Tome] Soldier anyway? Essentially provides what I wanted to capture in a martial type: (Ex) based superpowers, making ground explode because I hit it that hard, cut the sky by being JUST THAT HARDCORE.

Must also remind, that Charles Atlas Superpowers, though we want them in our martial-types, wouldn't give us the storytelling might of Paul Bunyans or have you. As I recall, being the grounds that Martial dudes would be strongly defined by the ruleset, while more magical means, are open to fiat easier.

As for Vagrant Story bit, if the ruleset fits your character, don't worry about the flavor too much, it's all possibly mutable anyway. Powersource is just character background,why I don't think Kratos is some templated creature, opposed to just being a higher level martial-type that gets swag from the gods. It's just what high level dudes do, and this line of thought what helped bring me out of the notion that only spellcasters allowed level appropriate abilities like most RPG-fans do. Brings me to another thought, when Mistborn, or anyone else, say a certain character is "out of genre" because it's a superhero, find that to be quite some BS (especially when you'll see them use superheros as examples in similar scenarios for their points). Superheros cover a range of power levels, and genres. From Bruce-Lee expys, Conan/Punisher, to Spiderman/Ironman/Wolverine, to Hulk/Magneto, and all the way to Silver Surfer/Dr.Manhatten. Superheros have also covered Sci-fi, Fantasy, and more Modern-day genres as well. Hell, some magic items that not too far from modern tech, or Sci-fi tech when in doubt, thus, quite easily interchangeable (even D&D wizards is one big science joke).


For those who care about Kenpachi here's little mention of him (at the bottom of the post)

I apologize if this seems to be a little jumping from thought to thought, hopefully be able to refine this when I have more time and sleep.

[tussock]

Handing out fighter powers in little packets (called "feats" or whatever, but functionally at-will or per-fight spells in disguise) would at least give designers the option to give them stupidly over-powered stuff the same way they do for Wizards and Clerics all the time, while giving players the ability to ignore all the crap ones.

Though now I say that, 4e Fighters started out terrible, and ended up minutely less terrible, so maybe that doesn't work after all. Heh, can you tell Mike Mearls likes Rogues? Monte Cook likes Wizards? What we need is a head designer who actually likes Fighters!



Fuck. Young (future game designer) nerds played with jocks who only played Fighters. So now they're punishing those people (who haven't played D&D in 15+ years) by making Fighters suck. Subconsciously and shit. It's true, because I just thought of it.

[Username17]

What we need is a head designer who actually likes Fighters!

No. We really don't. Andy Collins really likes fighters. When your lead designer is a Fighter fancier, you get a series of minor math tweaks that make their favorite fighting style or weaponry better at the cost of nerfing various other weapons and styles that have recently made them feel jealous. When your lead designer likes Fighters, you get Power Attack shifted from a TWF buff to a THF buff. Or maybe the opposite if it turns out that the designer in question loves dagger fighting rather than Andy's preferred Great Axe Dwarf. But you don't get Fighters being able to actually do anything interesting or useful. Because the designer in question like dumbass meat shields.

If you want Fighters to not suck, you want a game designer who really likes Superhero Comics.

-Username17

[Stubbazubba]

I nominate Joss Whedon.

[rasmuswagner]

What we need is a head designer who actually likes Fighters!

No. Because the designer in question like dumbass meat shields.

If you want Fighters to not suck, you want a game designer who really likes Superhero Comics.

-Username17

A-fuckin'-men.

[tussock]

I was more thinking the other way, that the Wizard-fan had made every non-caster suck, and the Rogue-fan had made every non-striker suck (except the ones who powered-up the strikers), so a Fighter-fan could make the casters suck. But that's 4e again.

So right you are. We'd probably get Wolverine for the Fighter, but at least it would be the comic version, not the movie version.

[sabs]

I'd happily take Hulk, Wolverine, Spiderman, Captain America as fighting men. Really, I'd rather not have a Fighter.

Tribal Warrior
Man at Arms
Soldier
Make interesting templates up to about 5th, maybe 7th. After that, the concept seriously needs to evolve.
Sword Mage, Elemental Warrior... something.