Shitty character concepts need to die

[Username17]

They of course made all the character concepts shitty but that isn't an inevitable consequence of such an equalizing treatment.

I'm going to leave this to stand alone so that you can think about how it pertains to your entire argument.

This is a hell of a lot easier to arrange if you start from a basis point that each turn they spend in combat should involve a roughly[/b] equal contribution.

You fail before you even begin. Imagine for the moment that you have a Knights of the Round party: 5 characters who are all Paladins. This is a pretty damn effective party in 4e despite being incredibly non-standard. It goes to slow, grindy victories that are incredibly inevitable. But the emphasis here is on slow. Let's consider another party: 5 Assassins (or its equivalent). Also quite thematic, but this time whether it wins or loses, it does so in a short period of time. The defensively minded party wins or loses in more actual turns than the offensively minded party does.

Even if the two teams have a precisely equal win/loss ratio, the fact that the Knights of the Round team took more rounds to achieve that record means that by definition the contribution per character per round was less in the Knights of the Round. The outcomes are the same, but the per-round output was definitely, unquestionably lower.

A system that tries to give equal contribution per round cannot work if characters are not given a strict time limit and the characters are not precisely equally focused on offense. In an actual RPG, this plan is a priori hopeless. It can only work in a Warhammer battle, where victory points are going to be tallied up at the end of a specific turn.

The "everything at will" resource management scheme is a trap and it will always be a trap

I disagree. I think that the Warlock was pretty damn close to being functional. With a few more tricks and a less shitty Eldritch Blast, they'd be fine from 1st to 10th. Which is all I'd ask from any base class. I mean, think of how easy it is for them to be broken the other direction. At Will Charm Monster would damn near do it all by itself.

and they are going to need abilities which are relevant in the world of the highest level spells the Wizard can cast - which is a hell of a lot easier if you just make them the same level.

No. It's not easier. Giving people abilities that are relevant when the Wizard gets his highest level spells is a necessity. But making them equal in any meaningful sense of the term is not helpful in this goal.

I mean sure, you can call the Hero's abilities that he picks up at 10th level "10th level Feats" just as you can call the Wizard's spells that he picks up at 10th level "10th level spells", but that is only a superficial - and ultimately meaningless - statement of equivalency. You can't actually transplant an ability directly from one set to the other and expect it to be even vaguely balanced. An ability transported from one ability list to another has wildly different synergies and may become wildly more or less powerful even if those ability lists are as bullshit as 4th edition's!

Furthermore, this immediately implodes as soon as you hit whatever tier where people get multiple resource types.

I'm cutting off the rest of your paragraph because it is non-sequitur. However, I do fundamentally agree that things get super difficult as soon as you hand out multiple resource types. Not because of "fighters can't have nice things", but because the moment you do that you are no longer able to control the environment each ability lives in.

Abstractly, defenses like displacement (which give you a chance to avoid enemy attacks) and defenses like regeneration (which negate a certain portion of the attacks that get through) may be completely balanced. But if you separately have a rage bar (which powers up when you take damage), then obviously the synergy with regeneration is high and the counter-synergy with displacement is as well. If you separately have interruptable attacks (which can be negated if enemies attacks are not avoided), then synergy is strong with displacement and the benefits of regeneration are minimal.

Once you mix abilities from one environment into another environment there will be consequences. Most of the consequences will be clear and demonstrable synergies and counter-synergies between the different environments and abilities. You can limit those consequences partially or wholly by forcing the different ability sets to be chosen to cover non-overlapping magisteria. This is not necessarily something I support, but it's certainly a thing that could be done.

But mostly, I think that the transfer from Heroic to Paragon is going to be a clusterfuck beyond all reason. Where nominally there are hundreds and hundreds of possible Heroic/Paragon combinations you could have, but in reality a few dozen of those choices will be dramatically superior to the others. And not all of them will be as simple or obvious as "Berserkers should go Verdant Lord because it allows them to take and recover from a lot of damage".

-Username17

[echoVanguard]

I think that the Warlock was pretty damn close to being functional. With a few more tricks and a less shitty Eldritch Blast, they'd be fine from 1st to 10th. Which is all I'd ask from any base class. I mean, think of how easy it is for them to be broken the other direction. At Will Charm Monster would damn near do it all by itself.

I'm confused. Any 6th-level Warlock worth his salt does have Charm Monster at-will, except for the bit where it only affects one target at a time. Is that what you're referring to?

echo

[Username17]

I think that the Warlock was pretty damn close to being functional. With a few more tricks and a less shitty Eldritch Blast, they'd be fine from 1st to 10th. Which is all I'd ask from any base class. I mean, think of how easy it is for them to be broken the other direction. At Will Charm Monster would damn near do it all by itself.

I'm confused. Any 6th-level Warlock worth his salt does have Charm Monster at-will, except for the bit where it only affects one target at a time. Is that what you're referring to?

echo

The one target at a time restriction is pretty severe. Having actual charm monster at will would be gonzo.

Warlocks can actually do pretty well with the one thrall at a time limit. Especially if you remember that upgrading a charmed thrall to a willing ally is a DC 15 Diplomancy test. If Warlocks are allowed to do that, they can pretty much hold their own all the way to the low double digits. Kind of a silly one trick setup though.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

Why does magic have to be better than not-magic? And, if it does, why not play a system that embraces that like Mage or Ars Magica?

[NineInchNall]

Magic doesn't technically have to be better than not-magic, but there are people who (as described by Frank) are unwilling to allow not-magic things to be used in nonstandard ways after the same fashion that magic things can be used. I believe the example was disintegration, where the two types are sword-based and magic-ray-based. The hypothetical DM will allow the player to use the ray to disintegrate a castle wall, but will not extend the same courtesy to the sword.

So it's not so much something inherent to the flavor text as it is something about how many people make extrapolations based on flavor text that bones the swording classes.

[Username17]

Why does magic have to be better than not-magic? And, if it does, why not play a system that embraces that like Mage or Ars Magica?

Magic does not "have" to be better than non-magic. Magic can be better than non-magic can be. Thus, if you go high enough in "level", then magic will be better than non-magic. Because non-magic is capped and magic isn't.

So let's look at our "stuff we will at some point be required to do" list:

• Monsters that are immune to swords and arrows because they are an uncountable number of bees or something and literally ignore anything that isn't an AoE.
• Monsters that are immune to swords and arrows because they are not solid.
• Monsters that are effectively or actually immune to swords and arrows unless they fulfill some arbitrary criteria like "being silver" or "being lawfully aligned".
• Monsters that are immune to swords and arrows because they are on another plane of existence.
• Monsters that are immune to swords and arrows because they are under water or ground.
• Monsters that are effectively immune to swords and arrows because they are only modestly slowed down by death (body jumpers, reforming vampires, and so on).
• Monsters that are immune to swords and arrows because you fight them in a completely different context like dream worlds or magic chess matches or psionic conflict.

And aside from the whole "you literally cannot punch this monster regardless of what numbers you nominally have for punching actions", there's also growth in "numbers" that have nothing to do with your attack and damage rolls. Combats get physically larger, meaning that you need to be able to strike enemies that are farther away and you need to be able to move longer distances in shorter times. But combats also get physically "larger" in the sense that the opposition "there are some Orcs" never actually goes off the table, but it stops being half a dozen Orcs and eventually becomes dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Orcs. To the point that Orcs themselves become an effectively unstabable swarm, where your ability to make attack rolls ceases to have any relevance because the MC isn't bothering to keep track of exactly how many Orcs there even are.

And of course, the enemy is also attacking you, which means that your "numbers" had better include various defensive numbers lest you die outright. Remember that not only do you need to roll against harder saves, but that you need to make more saves and the consequences of failing them are worse. So much so that you're going to need some sort of recovery abilities, because iterative probability is a bitch and there is absolutely no way you're getting through a lot of high level encounters without being slain/blinded/petrified/cursed/whatever. But team monster also does all kinds of crap that doesn't even let you roll dice. Battlefields fill up with darkness, solid fog, brambles, stone, poison gas, lava, deadly cold, and even impenetrable force fields. You need to be able to bypass those obstacles somehow, and recall that some of them specifically and explicitly cannot be physically moved through.

And not to put too fine a point on it: this is just battles. Quest locations can also be:

• On the other side of the planet.
• Under the sea.
• Several miles up into the air.
• On the Moon.
• In another plane of existence.
• In an undisclosed location somewhere in a trackless wilderness that is hundreds of kilometers across.
• In an unmarked building among tens of thousands of others just like it.
• Completely on fire, without oxygen, or in some other way impossible to survive in for more than a few seconds.

We also have social issues. The basic "convince an NPC of something" task doesn't really change if that NPC is the mayor, the sultan, or the Efreeti Sultan, so many social abilities actually scale effectively and automatically to higher level play without even having to change the numbers. But you also introduce "oratory", where you now need not just to persuade a dude but to propagandize people by the thousands or millions. And you need to be able to gather information that is completely segregated from any possible local legend or rumor because the quest in question is in one of those hard to reach places. Also you may need to talk to "people" that don't speak a language that ever existed on your planet and don't share an analogous set of gestures or facial features because they are trichordate radiates made out of stone.

And that's just to start. We haven't even gotten to the inane one-upsmanship of higher level play, where we have one of the preceding issues that is further exacerbated by the fact that it is arbitrarily "even more" and thus cannot be dealt with by the "normal" high level magic bullshit you need to deal with that sort of thing. Like the various death magic that not only kills you, it also requires that you get a higher level magic effect shaken over your corpse before you are allowed to undo death by the "normal" means of reviving the dead. D&D actually has a lot of that going on, which is why there's dispel magic, break enchantment, regeneration, and miracle that are all needed to overcome various curses of whatever sundry strengths they happen to be.

This one-upsmanship, while a big deal game mechanically, is not a terribly big deal conceptually. You get afflicted by curses, and you need to get rid of those curses, and only magic will do that. But if you describe it without game mechanics, dispel magic and break enchantment aren't really different. So when you're talking abstractly and without tying yourself down to a specific game system, the various tiers of counters don't really matter for purposes of the conceptual limits of a character. I can't really imagine a character who was conceptually capable of breaking a curse that was breakable with dispel magic but conceptually incapable of breaking a curse that needed at least break enchantment. And this is actually why I came down so hard on Virgil when he claimed that he had envisioned conceptual space for a "kill a dude" effect that was maximum level - because "kill a dude" is a first level effect and the higher tier versions of it aren't any more conceptually different than dispel magic and break enchantment.

So. There's that.

There comes a time when the adventure is at the bottom of the sea or the top of a cloud and there is absolutely no way to even get to the adventure that doesn't involve magic. Because it's a god damn fantasy setting and there are no available technological solutions and no "mundane" action can plausibly do anything about getting you there.

There comes a time when your combat encounter is that there is a dude in another realm of existence that is slightly out of phase with ours that is sending fire and forget summoned crap into your world to fuck with you like he was playing transdimensional Battleship. And since you're in a fantasy setting and don't have access to a fucking Star Trek deflector array, there is absolutely nothing you can fucking do about it without tapping into magic to do so.

Magic doesn't "have" to be better than non-magic. You could stop the game before any of those things happen, and have running around as a dirt covered swordsman be enough to get you through your challenges until the end of the campaign. But if you keep going and you face the Astral dickery or get tasked to go somewhere that is inaccessible by mundane means, then you either get yourself some fucking magic or you shut the fuck up and lose the game.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

Okay, but in a game where people who use magic and people who don't use magic are played at the same time why should magic ever get better? It's just poor design to release a game where, as you advance, certain core features become exponentially worse while others become exponentially better.

I mean, come on, Beowulf held his breath for a stupid amount of time to chase down Grendel's mom. It's not like there's no fantasy precedence for 'mundane' heroes doing things that we're not capable of. And if wizards aren't required to conform to reality why should other people be? The name of the game isn't Average Joes & Magical Demigods. And it's about playing with a group of people; why should anyone have a less effective character just because they like myths about Beowulf or Cu Chulainn or Lancelot instead of... well, D&D literature about wizards.

[Mistborn]

Okay, but in a game where people who use magic and people who don't use magic are played at the same time why should magic ever get better? It's just poor design to release a game where, as you advance, certain core features become exponentially worse while others become exponentially better.

Tradition mostly

I mean, come on, Beowulf held his breath for a stupid amount of time to chase down Grendel's mom. It's not like there's no fantasy precedence for 'mundane' heroes doing things that we're not capable of. And if wizards aren't required to conform to reality why should other people be? The name of the game isn't Average Joes & Magical Demigods. And it's about playing with a group of people; why should anyone have a less effective character just because they like myths about Beowulf or Cu Chulainn or Lancelot instead of... well, D&D literature about wizards.

Your barrel has arrived I assume you know what to do.

You clearly haven't read the other eleventy billion threads on this subject because Beowulf or what ever other example you want to bring up for team mundane are all still iredeemably shitty compared to D&D magic. Seriouly holding your breath for a long time compare that to Water Breathing or Heart of Water. Beowulf is at most a 10 level concept at even that is streching it. Beowulf has not answer to people who munder his ass while being intangible and/or hovering 200ft above him a.k.a. the standard opposition at high levels.

[virgil]

why should anyone have a less effective character just because they like myths about Beowulf or Cu Chulainn or Lancelot instead of... well, D&D literature about wizards.

The concern seems to be that Beowulf can't be in the same party as Elminster, and any advancement from Beowulf to Munchausen is a disservice to the player's concept; because going from Emelius Browne to Doctor Strange is without narrative whiplash?

[Username17]

Okay, but in a game where people who use magic and people who don't use magic are played at the same time why should magic ever get better?

Because magic can get better. If you keep gaining levels, you keep getting better. That means that if you keep gaining levels long enough, you have to be magic. Because magic can keep getting better, and non-magic can't.

It's just poor design to release a game where, as you advance, certain core features become exponentially worse while others become exponentially better.

You have that fundamentally wrong. Non magic doesn't get worse. It just stops getting better. There are limits to how high you can jump, and while they may be absurdly larger than what real people are capable of they still won't get you to the clouds or the Moon. They just fucking won't. Sooner or later you have to stop jumping and start flying if you want to get any higher. And if levels keep coming, you're going to need to go higher.

I mean, come on, Beowulf held his breath for a stupid amount of time to chase down Grendel's mom.

Yes he did. But he didn't have a conversation under water. He didn't sleep under water. He didn't have an entire fucking adventure that was literally at the bottom of the sea. And he couldn't do any of those things. Because mundane actions top out at holding your breath for an hour or something. And while that is well outside of the limits of real people, it's not even remotely close to the needs of an actual high fantasy high level adventure.

It's not like there's no fantasy precedence for 'mundane' heroes doing things that we're not capable of. And if wizards aren't required to conform to reality why should other people be?

Because they are high level. If you aren't magic, you aren't high level. You need magic to do high level things, because the mundane archetypes don't have any high level actions available for them to take. It doesn't mean you have to retire your swordsman, it means you have to retire the concept that your swordsman isn't magical.

The name of the game isn't Average Joes & Magical Demigods. And it's about playing with a group of people; why should anyone have a less effective character just because they like myths about Beowulf or Cu Chulainn or Lancelot instead of... well, D&D literature about wizards.

Because Beowulf and Cu Chulainn are much lower level than high level D&D Wizards. Or high level D&D Angel Guards. Or high level D&D Demigods. Or high level D&D anything. Because while he is very impressive, he's not a high level character. If Beowulf is being harassed by an extradimensional foe, all he can do is run away. There is nothing in his arsenal, nothing in his potential arsenal that would allow him to strike back at a monster that was outside of real space. Because he's mundane. Heroic, but still mundane. And that means that he is not a high level character. And if you want to play at high level, you have to play a character other than Beowulf. Or play Beowulf after he has become a Stormlord or Witch King or something and gotten himself some fucking magic.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

This is really circular logic: Magic can be better because magic can get better, non-magic can't get better because non-magic can't get better. And it's not even like D&D has always been like that; even as close back as 2E AD&D Fighters weren't nearly as outclassed as casters. It's a really recent thing, D&D-wise, that casters are inherently better at everything.

I get the feeling that when you say "D&D" you mean just 3E D&D because you don't seem to understand that it hasn't always been about caster supremacy.

Now, granted, D&D has never been very good at emulating really awesome warriors effectively, but why does that mean that we have to try and tweak a broken system while ignoring the broken parts instead of saying that the caster classes are the problem and working to fix that rather than rationalizing it with "but magic should be better because it's magic and magic is better because 3E said so"

[Chamomile]

There are limits to how high you can jump, and while they may be absurdly larger than what real people are capable of they still won't get you to the clouds or the Moon.

Why not? Jumping to the moon seems very much within the bounds of the fantasy genre.

[Verisimilitudinous]

Pretty much what I'm saying is why should high-level D&D martial characters be limited to mundane expectations of reality when you've already accepted a world where dragons can fly, beholders exist, and wizards regularly tell reality to just fuck off for a little while? In this world what is the point of accepting all of this and then saying, "But this dude, right here? He's gotta be normal."

[Username17]

any advancement from Beowulf to Munchausen is a disservice to the player's concept

Any "advance" of anyone to Munchhausen is a disservice to everyone's concept. Because Munchhausen is a character who exists in a world without rules of cause and effect. In Munchhausen, you can pull yourself out of quicksand by reaching down and yanking upwards on your own boots. Not because you in particular are magic or have telekinesis or something, but simply because in the entire Munchhausen milieu the laws of motion do not apply to anything.

You can't go up in level and become Munchhausen for the same reason you can't go up in level and become Daffy Duck. It's not that Daffy Duck isn't "more powerful", it's that Daffy Duck is a fucking cartoon character and his mere existence means that the story being told is reduced to absurdity. Munchhausen cannot exist simultaneously with cause and effect for fuck's sake! If Munchhausen steps into the picture, everyone's character concept is out the window, because literally nothing you do or have ever done matters anymore. You have explicitly written causality out of the picture and turned absolutely everything that was, is, or could be into absurdist farce.

I like games of Munchhausen. But there is no conceivable place for any of the characters or actions from that game in a game of D&D. None.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

Why not? Why does realism have to apply to this one dude but this other guy gets to ignore it just because of a single word? Is your imagination so set in its ways that you can only accept fantastical things if the explanation is, "magic did it."

What's wrong with keeping Fighters or Rogues or whatever competitive by saying that at a certain point they're just so badass/sneaky/whatever that they can do things no normal mortal can do because they're just that awesome and they've learned special techniques/meditated for a month/just refuse to believe it can't work/whatever? It's no more 'unrealistic' than stopping time or creating fire from nothing because you wiggled your fingers just right and said a special word or two.

[Username17]

Pretty much what I'm saying is why should high-level D&D martial characters be limited to mundane expectations of reality when you've already accepted a world where dragons can fly, beholders exist, and wizards regularly tell reality to just fuck off for a little while? In this world what is the point of accepting all of this and then saying, "But this dude, right here? He's gotta be normal."

Because when you, or anyone else, rants about how they have this idea of this totally epic warrior who's still totally mundane and make "totally unreasonable" demands about what they should be able to do, they still can't achieve high level effects. Because you come up with ways to "push the limits", where you imagine vast vistas of jumping higher, running faster, holding your breath longer, or whatever the fuck. And none of that shit matters!

Because when you go up in level, it stops mattering whether you can be harder, better, or faster. Because the vistas opening up before you are simply different. The places you go aren't reachable by jumping twice as high. They aren't reachable by jumping a thousand times as high. They might not be inside the atmosphere. They might not be in the universe. The question of how high, fast, hard, or long you go isn't one that the adventure even asks, because it's at a higher level than that!

When you ask for a mundane character, you are asking for a character with limits that he strains against. Read the fucking list of shit that happens for you to deal with at higher levels, and be honest with yourself: how much of that shit gives two rat fucks whether and how much you've strained against those human limits? Wrathzog was making the same damn argument you're making, and he took that list back on page 8 of this thread to go think about, and he hasn't been back since. It has been five actual days and he hasn't been able to come up with an answer. Because there fucking isn't an answer. Because Beowulf is not, has never been, and will never be a high level character concept.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

There is an answer; martials that can tell reality to fuck right off, too.

It's a pretty easy answer, maybe he was stumped that you couldn't get it?

[sabs]

There is an answer; martials that can tell reality to fuck right off, too.

It's a pretty easy answer, maybe he was stumped that you couldn't get it?

Okay..
How exactly does the Martial tell reality to fuck off, that won't have all the grognards complaining about weeabo.

Go on.. show us.
Also, You can totally have a Martial at High levels. As a Wizard's Champion, or a Holy Champion, or a Nature Warrior (IE Ranger). But he has to be able to say, and now I use the enchantment in my arm to do X. Or I pray to my God to allow me to open a gate into Hell, to go kick some ass.

[Username17]

There is an answer; martials that can tell reality to fuck right off, too.

It's a pretty easy answer, maybe he was stumped that you couldn't get it?

No. That's a flippant answer. It's not easy. You can't describe an action that Conan or Beowulf could take that would allow him to attack an enemy that was in another universe that would cause an impartial audience to conclude that he hadn't used any magic.

Remember, high level isn't about throwing causality out the window. It's very much not "we live in a cartoon world and nothing we do has any consequences". It's that you have high level problems and you have high level abilities which are causes whose predictable effect is that they solve the high level problems you have. It's not that reality is out the window, it's that reality includes the fact that you have the ability to create magical portals between universes, and that you can use those portals to go after extradimensional assholes who have been fucking with you.

In order to deal with high level problems, you need to have actual concrete abilities that allow you to deal with those problems in real ways. Flippant claims about how you'll punch the unpunchable and see the invisible or something something friendship isn't going to cut it. You live in a universe with cause and effect, and you need to bring up a cause whose effect is that you don't get locked out of the high level challenges. And once you've written up that science, it's already magic. Because any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. And if your science is distinguishable from magic, then it is insufficiently advanced.

---

But beyond the fact that you simply can't even play the game with "mundane" abilities at high level, there's also the fact that you are necessarily going to suck long before you reach that point. And that is because of extrapolation.

Since you seem determined to jump with both feet into this argument without having read any of the hundreds and hundreds of earlier posts, I'm just going to recycle the example of Evasion. What Evasion does game mechanically is that under certain circumstances it negates damage from attacks. It could have been a magical forcefield, but as it happens it is fluffed as non-magical dodging. Now, Evasion can't be used for anything that isn't written on the ability. No one suggests that because they have Evasion that they should be able to hold red hot metal without being burned or whatever. It just allows a character to take no damage if they are allowed a Reflex save for half damage and they make their save. That's all it does. And sometimes MCs get their panties in a bunch because they have a hard time imagining the character dodging the attack in the circumstance they are in. Imagine if instead it was fluffed as a magical forcefield, what would that mean? Well for starters, you could do things by extrapolation based on the fact that you had a magical forcefield. You could argue that you should be able to hand red hot metal on the forcefield and carry it around that way. Maybe the MC wouldn't let you do it, but you'd certainly be on plausible ground to make the argument. And if you were in a locked room or something, you'd get exactly zero shit from the MC about your forcefield activating.

Because Evasion is fluffed as a non-magical ability, it is capable of doing what its raw game mechanics offer or less. On the other hand, if it was a magical forcefield with otherwise identical underlying mechanics, it would be capable of what the raw mechanics offer or more. Why is that? Why is it that a "magical" ability is in all ways the equal or superior of a Charles Atlas Superpower? The answer is because of extrapolation. The fluff of the Charles Atlas power is always that you're still "just a guy", a guy who can apparently dodge really well in this instance, but still just a guy. There are no new capabilities or interactions with the physical world implied by your better dodging ability. On the flip side, a magical forcefield is a new thing, that in some way changes how you interact with the world around you. You can interact with the world as a guy who has a fucking forcefield if you want. And while that often isn't worth anything, there could come a time when it is.

When you have Charles Atlas powers, you're still interacting with the world as a person who has thumbs and can use leverage. That's all you are. When it comes time to extrapolate from your abilities to think up cause and effect solutions, you don't have any new causes. And that means that you will always be at best no better than a magic character who can produce the same raw game mechanical effects.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

harder, better, or faster. Because the vistas opening up before you are simply different.

So that video is I'm pretty sure supposed to be about an evil media conglomerate turning blue people into white people because the demographics for 80s throwback bands in 20XX are all racist against blue people, but I like it better as an 80s throwback band being manufactured whole-cloth, starting with base bodies crafted from blue putty, and the part we're seeing is just the last 20% or so of the whole process.

[darkmaster]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're aliens. There's another video where you see another one who's been, shot? or something, he's dying, and looks like the guitarist, and then the girl and the dying guy fly though... wood-arch-things. It's a bit confusing.

[ishy]

There is an answer; martials that can tell reality to fuck right off, too.

It's a pretty easy answer, maybe he was stumped that you couldn't get it?

If by that you mean that martials can now use magic too, sure that works.

The problem is simple, magic does what the designer says that magic does. It can have any power level you can imagine and that works for nearly everybody.

Non-magic abilities usually don't. There is a limit to the power level you can assign to them. This limit is different from person to person. Some may even allow it to go to any power level too. But for many people this breaks their verisimilitude.
For example: A DM I played under, wanted to nerf the amount of rounds characters could spend underwater because it was longer than olympic level swimmers are capable of in real life. While if we would present a (limited) waterbreathing spell to him, he'd have no problem with it at all.

- Edit because I forgot to finish my post:
You could allow non-magical chars to gain magic to fix the problem, you could cap the game at a certain power-level that makes non-magical chars still feel non-magical to most people or you could break the verisimilitude for many people and allow non-magical chars to shoot to extreme power levels or you could have the non-magical chars be inferior to magical chars (and/or suck resources from the magical chars, like the freeloaders that they are) .
But I don't think you have any other option.

Which happens to almost be the same thing I said on the first page, and nobody has offered any different option so far.

[Verisimilitudinous]

I think that I see the problem here. The problem is that (mostly 3E) D&D has people so convinced that anything special has to be magic that it has made a lot of people believe that anything special must be magic.

But... why? Why does it have to be magic? Would you describe a man just believing really hard that he could travel the planes, so he does, as magic? Why? How is that magic beyond sheer willpower? Because, really, it's not. Magic, properly, should be a single facet of the supernatural. Instead what's happening here is that the supernatural is being wrongfully conflated as being just another definition for magic.

What I'm suggesting is other, equally powerful, supernatural abilities for people who don't use magic. There is tons of fantastical evidence for this. People don't need to waggle their fingers and speak funny to do crazy shit in fiction. So, if we're going to have a fantasy game, why should we limit fantastical actions to a specific subset of characters? What, precisely, is wrong with a Fighter who just rips right through a Force Cage because goddamnit that magic shit is for dress-wearing pansies who can't face a REAL warrior. What's wrong with a Rogue who's just so damn slick that he literally steals time so that he can just tap into it when he needs a few extra seconds? What's wrong with a Barbarian who gets so angry that he distorts reality through sheer, unadulterated rage?

And why is any of that more wrong than a man who can make a gesture to call meteors from nothingness to destroy his enemies?



The moral of this story is that this is fantasy. People at high levels should not be constrained to mortal limits. If you're going to say that at a certain point some classes, in a game based around playing with other people, get to just fuck reality itself at a whim then every class should have roughly equal amounts of fuck-reality competence. Do you want to play Joe the Farmer in a game where Gandalf, the goddamn angel withe power over creation itself, takes a prominent role? Or would you rather play ROKNAR, SCOURGE OF PLANES who can actually contribute on the same level?


edit: I actually have no problem with 'normal' people gaining magic to stay competitive as they level up if magic is the only way to gain power in that setting, I just have an issue with 'magic' being the only thing that is power as a rule for every setting. It's pointlessly limiting.

Oh and for examples from modern media that wouldn't be chalked up to 'magic.' Riddick. David Rice from Jumper. Caliban Leandros from Rob Thurman's books (arguable, but I refuse to categorize innate racial features as 'magic' because that's just another narrow-minded conflation of supernatural with 'magic'). Relkin from Rowley's Bazil Broketail later books. So on.

[K]

Because Evasion is fluffed as a non-magical ability, it is capable of doing what its raw game mechanics offer or less. On the other hand, if it was a magical forcefield with otherwise identical underlying mechanics, it would be capable of what the raw mechanics offer or more. Why is that?

Letting people MTP up new abilities based on the flavor of their other abilities is bad thing to allow in the game. It's basically an admission that you have given up on even the idea of game balance.

There isn't even an issue with mundane vs magic flavor if you aren't letting people MTP up things for their powers to do.

Sure, MTP has been the basis of RPGs since their beginnings, but I honestly can't see a downside to removing as much arbitrary, unfair, and frankly lame MTP nonsense that happens like where suddenly the DM decides that your explicit abilities don't work because of some MTP reason the DM made up, or the DM suddenly powers up some character's MTP efforts because it's the DM's girlfriend.

[Verisimilitudinous]

Oh and originally mundane heroes really shouldn't be mundane at a certain point. They shouldn't be just moving 5' and attacking five times, or charging and attacking five times, or tripping some guy. They should be taking reality by the scruff of it's neck and shaking until reality cries uncle and lets them do as they please, while the casters are persuading reality to change through arcane chants/invocations of a deity.