Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1091127147[/unixtime]]Hero stories that I like always have the fighters pulling some crazy crap against bigger and harder to damage foes. Rather than trading blows unitl one guy drops, they trade blows until one guy pulls some crazy crap.
After watching Conan the Destroyer this weekend, I totally realized just how skilled the classis bronzed barbarian was; Vs the boss monster, he fought with his sword and stuff and got his butt kicked, but it wasn't until he grappled the monster that he won the day.
This is a problem pretty much from D&D being a noncinematic battle system. Tried and true methods are going to win the day, as opposed to cool improvised ones. It really doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with the problem with fighters, but rather with the combat system in general. To support cinematicness you basically have to get rid of feats and most forms of specialization.
Maybe its just Hollywood, but I think that monsters have big bonuses(to make them simple to run) and fighters have good tricks like maneuvers and stuff to cancel out the numerically superior foe.
Yeah, generally that's the way things should go, however you're still going to lose agaisnt stuff like the collossal scorpion, because its bonuses are simply too large to beat with trick feats. Basically against a creature like that you've got to just get out of melee altogether and fight it another way.
Take a feat like Elusive Target(Foe? I dunno. the CW feat). It cancels Power Attack. PA is a huge feat and the main power of high strength monsters like giants.
The strength of giants is that they can always hit you. Their damage is already huge, so they don't need power attack that much. What you really want to negate is their strength bonus to attack rolls, not their bonuses to damage.
Monsters need to be simple stat blocks. Make fighters the crazy tricks guys who out-tactics bruisers, along with the wizards who outspell monsters who have fixed spell lists with unlimited castings and rogues who try to outsneak monsters with cammo skin or natural invis.
Bruisers must beat fighters, because everything else can generally beat a bruiser. A wizard easily beats them wtih tactical spell use (since they can't adapt) and a rogue can generally just sneak past them, or do use magic device to do some of the same things the wizard does. This leaves the fighter wtih the class that must take a loss here.