FrankTrollman wrote:
Well, it was the entire party against her, so yeah. The point is that there wasn't any amount of being more of a bad ass warrior you could be that would bring you to Bavmorda's level of power. While of course, adding more levels of Wizard to Willow eventually would.
If the game went on long enough such that the characters were individually a match for Bavmorda and the end bosses were dragons, demon lords, and other things that required a special effects budget just to walk in the room - then Madmartigan's player would either have to update Madmartigan into a magic knight or scrap the character and make a new one that had some juice.
Because levels of "can do mundane things" simply do not, and cannot go up to "do things that surpass mundanity."
It depends on what you consider "mundane" exactly. I mean I could totally see batman sneaking up on Bavmorda and batteranging her before she could get a spell off, and he's what we would consider mundane. I could see Legolas taking out a dragon, a hydra or a demon with his bow.
Bavmorda would come out on her balcony and say "Pigs! You're all Pi-" interrupted as an arrow hits her in the face and she falls to hear death. That's totally a way the movie would have ended if Robin hood was the hero instead of Willow.
I could even see circumstances where Conan would beat her. He may just be tough enough to shrug off the spell, unless you'd consider that some kind of mystical property and that's only true if you defined magic that way. Perhaps magic can be fought off by people with a strong "Badass factor", I mean you can totally design it that way such that nonmagic has means of fighting it off, in much the same way you can have a disciplined non-psionic mind fight off a telepath.
The one thing that doesn't work is a frontal attack on her castle with a bunch of meleers when she know you're coming. Aside from that, I really didn't see any great magical defenses on her that would prevent any mundane weapon from fucking her up.
I can see if you're arguing about fighting the undead or some shit and saying that normal weapons don't affect them at all, but seriously, anything that can get killed by decapitation or any other kind of mundane wound is beatable by a fighter.
Now keep in mind, in a lot of cases, this means the fighter has to be willing to pick up a bow. A swordsman is going to run into a lot of things he just can't beat. But even then, the amount of flying ranged attackers you put in your world is up to the designer. There may not be many at all, and archery from atop a pegasus may well not be stable enough to get any kind of reliable accuracy. Or the threat alone from having your mount get arrow'd from below and a fatal drop might be enough to deter people from using flying mounts much.
If you want to use monsters like in D&D, where you have mass teleporting super casters, then yes, you're absolutely right that fighters can't compare. But as far as designing a game from scratch, you could totally design one that could simulate fantasy movies like Willow while allowing fighters to still be useful.
Ironically if you look at manifested Sauron in LotR, you could possibly even make the argument that high level wizards can't compete with him, given he's basically immune to magic, but you can beat him by cutting off the ring. There you've got a Bavmorda level warrior type. Yeah, sure he's a magical being, but he's basically just a dude hitting people with a mace. If you don't beat him the right way, by severing his ring finger.. you just lose. Yet Sauron totally loses to Isuldur and Elrond, even though Sauron could have walked up to Bavmorda and backhanded the old witch without any effort.
