@Magic Beats Martial,
by design? Hmm, sort of unlimited topic necro on this one, isn't it. Soz.
Drolyt wrote:tussock wrote:The designers totally just intended this state of affairs, over and over again.
The rest of your post doesn't really support this.
The rest of the post was more true than the brief generalisation.
See, the fact that they kept patching the fighter strongly implies they wanted it to be a useful class. As I understand it exceptional strength and the bit where warrior classes get more from a high constitution were both added on to make fighters better. Also fighters didn't even get a 1d10 hit die until AD&D. Plus all the things you mentioned. It seems that someone wanted fighters to not suck.
The d10 in 1975 with Greyhawk. That someone was E. Gary Gygax, who served the game from 1972 until 1985. Frank Mentzer was his best bud at the company and also did shit to help Fighters, like crazy-tables full of weapon mastery that ... it's complicated, but they don't stop 20d6 fireballs.
UA had stuff like double normal stat mods for Barbarians and randomised +1/2 levels to physical stats for Cavaliers/Paladins as trial balloons for the 2nd edition martial classes. The concept was to replace random %-Strength with more reliable class bonuses. Plus huge class-based damage mods for martial classes.
But it wasn't enough to really change things, and he also wanted to split the Mage up into even more classes with shorter lists and more natural restrictions, split the Clerics up with specialty mods like the FR priests got in the end, and shift the hit point balance up and with a bigger gap to casters. Beef the monsters up a bit to keep them safe from the easy spells but keep the martial types well ahead of them.
Gary thought Lords should slaughter Giant clans while riding subdued Dragons as their armies lobbed great siege stones at the problems from a safe distance. Awe humanoids into service and use them as trap fodder. That's how his office games played out. But most people were still choosing casters, so he was working on making it better.
http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.co.nz/ ... ition.html
That's a gigantic EGG quote-fest from various sources about what might have been, had Lorraine Williams not captured D&D and frozen it in time to half-ass 1985 standards for fifteen years of slowly giving Wizards more and better spells and Fighters more rules that fucked them over for using a sword.
I'm pretty sure Cook just thought it would be more fun if casting was easier and didn't think it through. I'm not sure he was entirely wrong, I love 3e casting mechanics.
Monte Cook is a good game designer. He and Skip Williams had long and heated arguments about what
exactly it was kept Wizards' players from dominating AD&D games, when mechanically it was so easy.
Skip thought the old restrictions trained players to let other classes handle as much as possible for so long that it just became a habit. Monte thought it was table manners and the restrictions served no real purpose. They're both right, but with the brakes taken off,
eventually Wizard players lost patience with all the sandbagging. Took about ... six months in my home games, at least to all be multi-class casters, but from there it was soon everyone a full caster. Except poor me and the odd other holdout.
But the magic system itself is vastly better in 3e (along with most mechanics). Stacking, interactions, figuring out what things actually do by the book, it just works. Great job. No stupid ass weapon speed factors vs casting times and blind initiative. But the saves stopped working, and that in itself is unforgivable in a game where magic is awesome. Haste double your spell output while not helping the Fighters as much. WTF? Armour-piercing spells for everyone, all the time? Shoot a bow at 400' and it's -lots, a spell and it's about +10 because you ignore armour? Why? Because fuck Fighters is why.
I don't think they really intended for clerics to be the "best class", they just wanted them to not suck and went too far.
Dragon 267, Jan 2000 wrote:Fortunately, playing a cleric gets a lot better with the new edition of the D&D game.
We talked to designers Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams ... to learn how they plan to make clerics more players' first choice.
They were betting on 4-PC parties, and always having someone wanting to play a Cleric. Out of 11 classes. That's got to be a
really good class, in ways that stand out. Which it does. They wanted it, they got it, they're professionals, it wasn't an accident. OK?
Drolyt wrote:tussock wrote:Another thing they "fixed" for 3e was Fighters who were comparatively hard to kill. Everyone got more hit points and the monsters got way higher damage, and Fighters suddenly are useless compared to any old cheap-ass summons, let alone a polymorph.
Again, I'm pretty sure their goal was to avoid rocket tag gameplay, not to nerf fighters.
Yes, they re-nerfed 1-round Fireball annihilation by raising everyone's hit points. But the increase in most monster attacks and damage to being vastly above the Fighter output at all levels was new to the game. The hit points too, monsters routinely have double what a Fighter gets, up from about the same.
Simple numbers, the monsters (like the Clerics) are better fighters than the Fighters are, and it's one spell to bring multiple monsters to the table from 1st level. That wasn't a mistake, that was deliberately making things that would eat multiple rounds of Fighter output and making them caster pets at lower level than ever before. Plus Charms and easier demon-summoning and Polymorph that gives you everything the monster has.
They did that to suit their new initiative system. Which choked on the classic big fights against hordes of mooks. So they cut back the numbers of monsters and increased their hit points and damage. And when that made them better than Fighters,
that was the idea. It's not out of spite, but they totally noticed and just went ahead with it. Fighters being incompetent and useless was a price they were willing to pay, on the grounds that people wouldn't notice if there was a Cleric and Wizard around. Like forever.
AD&D Fighters do also suck for a long time without spell support and healing, but AD&D Casters have a hard time of life without their quality meat shields too. 3e casters lost that, spell interruption is impossible in comparison.
Fighters not being able to kill Giants and Dragons? That's deliberate, people used to complain about it, so Giants and Dragons have been getting more and more out of reach for a long time. While 3.0 Fighters could still kill demons, Wizard-players who summoned them complained about that. So 3.5 Fighters cannot kill demons, but they're even easier to summon and command with spells. "Fixed" again.
Could you provide some evidence for this?
Gelugon, CR 13. 3.0/3.5
HP: 114/137
AC: 28/32
Att: +17/+20
Dam: 1d8+9/2d6+9
DC: 21/23
SR: 25/25
They're like that across the board, same monster, same CR, just dramatically harder to sword and more dangerous to stand next to, but not any harder to magic for the most part. It became the monster that Fighters simply fail against. But they are actually easier to make pets of in 3.0, with slightly lower HD and saves, so that bit was bullshit.
The top end really jumped, but it got +x CR too, so whatever. Most just got a bunch of anti-Fighter tweaks because ... unfortunately my google-fu is not up to finding people complaining about demons and devils being weak-sauce in 2001. But I'm pretty sure it was just that Fighters had killed monsters, boo hoo.
Dragons? OD&D: ~30 hit points. AD&D ~60 hit points, 3rd level spells. 2nd edition ~200 hit points, 5th level spells. 3e ~700 hit points, 9th level spells. Giants a bit slower, but dramatic too. Attacks and damage for both through the roof every edition.
Pathfinder is written by someone who saw sales explode for D&D when casters were given deliberate casual dominance of the game and martials were nerfed into uselessness. He deliberately made it easier for casters, in a line-by-line destruction of things which made life slightly difficult for them, and also deliberately took out anything that had anyone suggested to make martial characters useful in a fight. Deliberate, intentional, line-by-line nerfs for martial PCs; to keep them in their place, as low level grunts.
You are giving the Pathfinder devs way too much credit. Remember that they told everyone martial was buffed and then stealth nerfed them in a way most players wouldn't notice. I refuse to believe they are actually competent enough to do that on purpose.
When Frank & K went there and told them how Rogues worked, they didn't know. But once they learned, there was a line-by-line edit pass to remove from the game everything that let Rogues keep up with casters. As Frank & K had pointed out everything, everything got the nerf-bat. Thus their shitty Rogues. Deliberately.
That thing where they fucking hate Monks?
They hate Monks! It's just that simple. There's a change in Pathfinder where Mirror Image doesn't stop you being targeted with spells, just with weapons. Really. It's a common monster spell-like at high levels. The game is full of that shit. Even the spell nerfs were entirely for things you could actually give a Wizard a bad day by casting at them.
Even the Polymorph changes. Who does that really fuck but the Troll-Fighters and Tiger-Monks and scary secret surprise monsters. Hmm? Clerics don't care, they can still be giant Clerics. Wizards never used it for themselves anyway, better things to do.
None of it is an accident. Wizards, from original conception, as supported in the fiction, are a high level concept that destroys everything in the game at their whim. Fighters are low level grunts that have a hard time with bears and ogres, again supporting the fiction. People hate restrictions on magic, and they hate martial types having nice things.
Except people are always complaining about martial types not having nice things. There is a problem where a lot of people want them to somehow not suck while also not doing anything but swing their sword, but that is just cognitive dissonance.
You can trivially build a game where swinging your sword gets you up close and personal with troublemaking Evil gods and then kills them by stabbing as the campaign climax. The story of GDQ is exactly that happening, though the final module notes Gods may be harder to kill than that if the DM so chooses for their campaign, but they are not so by default in AD&D. It's not even a problem.
2nd edition AD&D was the first time that the default was to have gods which you could not just stab and take over their portfolio. The Time of Troubles for the Realms is just that, humans stabbing several gods and taking their divine portfolios. The end-game in Mentzer-D&D is just stabbing stuff until you ascend to being an immortal, on less XP than a Wizard does.
It's really
not cognitive dissonance. 3e doesn't allow martial characters to win, not at all, the progressions aren't even close, but you can just design to allow martial characters to win in any game. In AD&D you stab giants and drow and then step through the drow portal to stab the drow's god and take all their Clerics away forever.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
