Things Other People Aren't Allowed to Like

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I reckon Charisma could just be folded into the Willpower part of Wisdom with purchasing social traits made slightly more cost effective as part of a readily available 'intimidating', 'attractive' or 'diplomatic' combo, and making the awareness portion of Wisdom use the best modifier of wisdom, intelligence, or dexterity, describing it as whatever combination of paranoia, systematic investigation, spidey-sense, or general twitchiness seems most appropriate. The advantage to such is that stealth is e'er so slightly more easily detected which encourages skill rolls that usually get overlooked otherwise, a stat gets eliminated, and skill point-reduction combos get incorporated in a far more likely to be used way than the +2 to 2 skill feats which hack d20 writers inundated the system with.

[Gx1080]

It's not the dedicated casters you need to worry about if implementing such a change, it's the "But fighters are fine the way they are! ToB is overpowered!" crowd.

I wouldn't worry about them. They sound like a bunch of retards.

[Cynic]

I've often wondered if health and AC just can't be made into one number.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Fighters: I do agree that the definition of Fighter is "he who sucks a lot on High-level D&D". I still propose the simple solution: Make ToB classes standard (with some polish of course), nerf Wizards. Really, is a simple problem with a simple solution. Also, haters of that book tend to be, you guessed it, Wizards.

The ToB classes suck from a conceptual standpoint. Even if they do have level-appropriate numbers for their combat schtick, for the most part they're left sticking their thumbs up their asses if the combat music isn't playing.

The Fighter Suckage problem is more than just a numerical problem; 4E D&D has showed us that even if you fix the underlying numbers, the basic concept of a Nonfantastical Vanilla Action Hero is completely borked once you get to a certain level of gameplay and if you don't retire this worthless goatfelcher by then then they'll twist the game around to accommodate their deep and unrelenting suckage.

[echoVanguard]

naughty words

I don't think this is correct. Generally speaking, the problem isn't that vanilla heroes don't have applicable non-combat skills, but that magic-using characters have abilities that supersede skills beyond a certain level. To me, that speaks rather clearly that the problem is a poorly-designed magic system, not that Fighters are an intrinsically non-viable archetype.

echo

[Username17]

naughty words

I don't think this is correct. Generally speaking, the problem isn't that vanilla heroes don't have applicable non-combat skills, but that magic-using characters have abilities that supersede skills beyond a certain level. To me, that speaks rather clearly that the problem is a poorly-designed magic system, not that Fighters are an intrinsically non-viable archetype.

echo

No. The point is that having "non combat skills" only matters as long as your non-combat challenges are bullshit enough to let them matter. 4e shows us that if you ask players to take their ability to climb seriously at epic levels that your "epic" adventures are going to look really fucking small.

-Username17

[tzor]

The Fighter Suckage problem is more than just a numerical problem; 4E D&D has showed us that even if you fix the underlying numbers, the basic concept of a Nonfantastical Vanilla Action Hero is completely borked once you get to a certain level of gameplay and if you don't retire this worthless goatfelcher by then then they'll twist the game around to accommodate their deep and unrelenting suckage.

That's because there more to the problem than the underlying numbers.

By the way, are people seriously talking about 4E and non combat skills in the same paragraph? I thought the non combart of 4E was FUBAR.

Besides climb is such a limited notion. I mean what would "epic climb" be anyway? I mean it's not like you can climb the back of an anchient dragon in flight and deliberately trying to get you to fall off ... or is it?

Oh yea, that's combat ... nevermind.

Did I mention that non combat skills need to be able to easily integrate into the combat mode or else it's crap? Oh yea, over in the diplomacy thread.

[echoVanguard]

The point is that having "non combat skills" only matters as long as your non-combat challenges are bullshit enough to let them matter. 4e shows us that if you ask players to take their ability to climb seriously at epic levels that your "epic" adventures are going to look really fucking small.

-Username17

That doesn't make any sense. In the absence of a flying spell, a climb up a storm-wracked cliff to reach the Dread Necromancer's Doom Keep is quite epic. It really sounds to me like the definition of "epic" you're putting forth is a tautology along the lines of "anything inherently beyond the scope of nonmagical characters".

If we look carefully at the various interactions permitted in a TTRPG, we really only come up with 5 things (the first three of which are the most prevalent):

1. Small-scale, tactical combat (the sort the party usually engages in)
2. Social Encounters (talking to NPCs)
3. Environmental Challenges (stealth/infiltration and dealing with traps/hazards/landscape)
4. Economic Interaction (buying/selling items or goods and manipulating local or non-local economies)
5. Large-scale combat (siege/army battles)

Any character of any class should be able, by design, to meaningfully contribute to all 5 of these situations at every level of play. It would probably be a good idea to plot out a low-level, mid-level, high-level, and very-high-level example of each of those situations before you attempt to illustrate how any of them are intrinsically unsolvable by means of skills.

echo

[Gx1080]

Well, now that's more consice than a 19 page thread lol.

I'll admit that I looked at the number-crunching first, since without it is a non-starter. After it, a curbing of "Is magic I ain't gotta to explain shit", leaving the big-non combat spells (Dimensional transport, etc) on Rituals that can be done for everybody and giving Fighters either some super-human stuff or giving them capacity to raise worthwhile armies of not-that-awesome guys, super diplomacy, super strategy or something.

[Draco_Argentum]

That doesn't make any sense. In the absence of a flying spell, a climb up a storm-wracked cliff to reach the Dread Necromancer's Doom Keep is quite epic. It really sounds to me like the definition of "epic" you're putting forth is a tautology along the lines of "anything inherently beyond the scope of nonmagical characters".

Epic in D&D usage does mean that. The epic rules come into play after you've been transporting yourself to hell and kicking its ass. Climbing a cliff just doesn't belong.

[Lago PARANOIA]

By the way, are people seriously talking about 4E and non combat skills in the same paragraph? I thought the non combart of 4E was FUBAR.

What I was trying to get at was that there's more to having a viable character than having a balanced combat schtick.

[jadagul]

echoVanguard: I don't think Spiderman can reasonably be described as an "epic character." But climbing up a storm-wracked cliff is still a trivial challenge for him.

More generally, there's a huge vocabulary confusion going on in this thread, which you're giving a great example of here. You say, roughly, that "in the absence of a fly spell, climbing a storm-wracked cliff is a major challenge" (I'm leaving the word epic out because that's an entire other set of confusion). But what's really true is that in the absence of something that makes climbing trivial, that's a major challenge. And that's Lago's point.

If the wizard can cast "fly," that's not a real challenge. And the wizard can do that tirivally by level 10, without expending any real resources. So everyone else needs to be able to do that too. The wizard can fly. The cleric can have his god reveal a path. The thief becomes spiderman and just walks up the damn cliff sideways. The fighter jumps up two miles and lands on the top of the cliff. Whatever.

As long as you insist that you need "a spell" to trivialize stuff like that, characters that don't have access to "spells" are screwed. If we change "a spell" to "an ability" the whole problem goes away. As long as you're okay with giving abilities like that to everyone.

[echoVanguard]

Spiderman

...Spiderman? I understand there's a certain level of analogy going here, but if we can't discuss fantasy tropes without having to use comic book superheroes for frames of reference, that's a big problem on its own right there.

...what's really true is that in the absence of something that makes climbing trivial, that's a major challenge. And that's Lago's point.

This is actually my point as well.

If the wizard can cast "fly," that's not a real challenge. And the wizard can do that tirivally by level 10, without expending any real resources. So everyone else needs to be able to do that too. The wizard can fly. The cleric can have his god reveal a path. The thief becomes spiderman and just walks up the damn cliff sideways. The fighter jumps up two miles and lands on the top of the cliff. Whatever. As long as you insist that you need "a spell" to trivialize stuff like that, characters that don't have access to "spells" are screwed. If we change "a spell" to "an ability" the whole problem goes away. As long as you're okay with giving abilities like that to everyone.

The fact is, however, that people love to take these things for granted as if they were a universal law of game design, but they aren't. Spells don't have to be trivial - a mage in Shadowrun attempting to Levitate up a cliff is by no means guaranteed success, and may have to expend significant resources to do it. By the same token, you don't necessarily have to have an ability that trivializes an obstacle in order to be capable of dealing with that obstacle. The wizard can use magic to fly up the cliff, but it doesn't have to be as simple as "I cast fly. I'm at the top of the cliff now." It doesn't have to be as straightforward as "I ask my god to move the cliff to where I am. So he does it." And so forth. If a challenge is appropriate for the level of any character, regardless of class, then their ability to succeed at that challenge should fall within a reasonably well-specified range of probability. Some characters/classes might have higher base chances of success than others, but in any situation where one archetype has to struggle to overcome a challenge while another archetype effectively auto-succeeds, that's a serious problem with the game's underlying mechanics.

echo

[Lago PARANOIA]

Some characters/classes might have higher base chances of success than others, but in any situation where one archetype has to struggle to overcome a challenge while another archetype effectively auto-succeeds, that's a serious problem with the game's underlying mechanics.

This is also another reason why 4E epic does not feel like real epic and would never feel like epic even if they fixed their skill and skill challenge system. When you have that philosophy then challenges have to be pegged to the skill of the lowest character. 'Climbing up a sheer cliff in a hurricane' is always going to be a problem for some characters; the cleric for instance has no easy way to do that except at really high levels but he's able to take on challenges with a generic difficulty level higher than long before he can master the cliff-climbing challenge. If you didn't want to lock out the cleric or other characters then you're delaying the scaling of obstacles; which means that you have to lock everyone else's advancement as well. And doing that enough times makes your power escalation stall out at mid-superheroics at best before the game ends.

Here's a hint: it generally does not matter if only one person in the party is remotely in sight of the success rate for a particular challenge. What's important, as far as fairness goes, is that the screentime is distributed equally. I mean going back to comics, if there's a problem only the superspeed or superscience guy can solve, you really don't need to have the other characters in the party to even be within sight of the challenge as long as A) the resolution of the single-person spotlight is quick and B) the distribution of obstacles is fair.

[jadagul]

echo: you're right that spells don't have to be trivial. So there are two solutions to the problem I outlined. You can give fighters and rogues and everyone else powers as big as wizards' and clerics', or you can scale down clerics and wizards to match what you're comfortable giving to fighters and rogues. The second one works perfectly fine as game balance; you just have to accept that fly and invisibility are always going to be absolute top-tier powers and the wizard never gets anything cooler than that.

[Dog Quixote]

The fact is, however, that people love to take these things for granted as if they were a universal law of game design, but they aren't. Spells don't have to be trivial - a mage in Shadowrun attempting to Levitate up a cliff is by no means guaranteed success, and may have to expend significant resources to do it. By the same token, you don't necessarily have to have an ability that trivializes an obstacle in order to be capable of dealing with that obstacle. The wizard can use magic to fly up the cliff, but it doesn't have to be as simple as "I cast fly. I'm at the top of the cliff now." It doesn't have to be as straightforward as "I ask my god to move the cliff to where I am. So he does it." And so forth. If a challenge is appropriate for the level of any character, regardless of class, then their ability to succeed at that challenge should fall within a reasonably well-specified range of probability. Some characters/classes might have higher base chances of success than others, but in any situation where one archetype has to struggle to overcome a challenge while another archetype effectively auto-succeeds, that's a serious problem with the game's underlying mechanics.

echo

I don't see why everyone needs to have their own solution to the problem. If the Wizard summons some pegasi to fly the whole party that's fine. The problem comes when the wizard can contribute to the party with this kind of utility and the fighter can do nothing other than contribute in combat, which every class can do as well. If the fighter can do some kind of interesting high level stuff it might be more worth playing.

One of the issue with fighters in both 3e and 4e is the way they've become purely physical characters. A high level ability for a fighter should involve things like the ability to train a bunch of peasants to become an elite fighting force in a single week.

[echoVanguard]

And doing that enough times makes your power escalation stall out at mid-superheroics at best before the game ends.

How is this a bad thing, exactly?

Here's a hint: it generally does not matter if only one person in the party is remotely in sight of the success rate for a particular challenge. What's important, as far as fairness goes, is that the screentime is distributed equally. I mean going back to comics, if there's a problem only the superspeed or superscience guy can solve, you really don't need to have the other characters in the party to even be within sight of the challenge as long as A) the resolution of the single-person spotlight is quick and B) the distribution of obstacles is fair.

First off, comics aren't really a good example, because they're not the same kind of medium. Characters who aren't on-screen at a given time aren't actively not having fun. Secondly, there's a significant difference between one person having a much greater chance to succeed at a task (and thus being the one performing it while the others assist or observe), and having one person who is the only one even able to participate in a task. It's OK for the fighter to say, "Well I *could* climb up this cliff, but it's easier for the Wizard to fly us up, and I can always climb it if something goes wrong with *his* plan", but it's not OK for the same situation to happen with something the fighter can't even affect, like planar travel or Not Dying From Vacuum, while the wizard can deal with these problems by default. The real problem, quite frankly, is not that the fighter doesn't have some sort of method to deal with these problems, but that the wizard does, and they're trivial.

echo

[Username17]

And doing that enough times makes your power escalation stall out at mid-superheroics at best before the game ends.

How is this a bad thing, exactly?

Because the game has gods as villains. I have no problem putting the Vanilla Action Hero in Asymmetric Threat as a playable character, because the top end of the projected antagonists are Batman villains. But in D&D, your opponents top out at Brainiac and Darkseid, and it is wildly inappropriate to come up with a character that tops out at the level of Wildcat or Huntress.

-Username17

[echoVanguard]

Because the game has gods as villains. I have no problem putting the Vanilla Action Hero in Asymmetric Threat as a playable character, because the top end of the projected antagonists are Batman villains. But in D&D, your opponents top out at Brainiac and Darkseid, and it is wildly inappropriate to come up with a character that tops out at the level of Wildcat or Huntress.

-Username17

In 3E, that's probably true. But gods in 2E were generally very different from gods in 3E (and I don't know what they're like in 4E at all). Furthermore, I'm generally talking about Fantasy TTRPG design in general when I post, not specifically 3.X gaming. The opponent power curve can be very different across different systems and settings - you don't exactly get into fisticuffs with Raccoon in Shadowrun, after all.

echo

[Username17]

Because the game has gods as villains. I have no problem putting the Vanilla Action Hero in Asymmetric Threat as a playable character, because the top end of the projected antagonists are Batman villains. But in D&D, your opponents top out at Brainiac and Darkseid, and it is wildly inappropriate to come up with a character that tops out at the level of Wildcat or Huntress.

-Username17

In 3E, that's probably true. But gods in 2E were generally very different from gods in 3E (and I don't know what they're like in 4E at all). Furthermore, I'm generally talking about Fantasy TTRPG design in general when I post, not specifically 3.X gaming. The opponent power curve can be very different across different systems and settings - you don't exactly get into fisticuffs with Raccoon in Shadowrun, after all.

echo

That is factually untrue.

It wasn't true in first edition either.

In D&D, high level characters fight Darkseid. If your character concept cannot conceptually fight Darkseid, it is not a high level D&D concept. QED.

-Username17

[Psychic Robot]

This adventure, and Vecna's multiverse-shattering plan contained within it, have been used by some D&D fans as an in-game explanation of the differences between the 2nd and 3rd editions of Dungeons & Dragons.[citation needed]

[echoVanguard]

I think that perhaps my wording wasn't clear - my statement was not that players didn't fight gods in previous editions, but rather that the act of fighting gods in previous editions was different, due to how gods in various editions are statted out.

echo

edit - clarity

[Swordslinger]

Because the game has gods as villains. I have no problem putting the Vanilla Action Hero in Asymmetric Threat as a playable character, because the top end of the projected antagonists are Batman villains. But in D&D, your opponents top out at Brainiac and Darkseid, and it is wildly inappropriate to come up with a character that tops out at the level of Wildcat or Huntress.

Gods in live action style cinematics are often not all that powerful.

Examples include: Conan the Destroyer, Hercules and Xena.

All those characters take on gods, and they're as Vanilla action hero as you can get.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Secondly, there's a significant difference between one person having a much greater chance to succeed at a task (and thus being the one performing it while the others assist or observe), and having one person who is the only one even able to participate in a task.

Again, this is not a problem as long as the resolution is quick and the obstacle distribution is fair. You're hung up on this cliff thing; what the hell is the cleric and bard supposed to do? If you took Air Walk out of the game, it would take a fucklong time before they got enough power to even have a chance of tackling that thing. In the meantime you're forcing the wizard and rogue and fighter to not advance so they don't get to the point of 'wave their hand and instantly solve the obstacle'. The average party power level would still be stuck at Batman level even in the mid-levels because otherwise party members would've developed schticks to trivialize this obstacle long ago.

Now, the 'sit in the back and diddle your cock/twat' problem does affect some classes a disproportionate amount of time and it is a problem. But part of your problem here is that you're defining the task way too narrowly. If you assign the task of 'climb the mountain in a hurricane' then the cleric and bard are going to stall out the party if you insist on them being able to minimally participate. If you assign the task of 'get to the top of the mountain' then things open up and you don't have to flatten the power curve as much.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Gods in live action style cinematics are often not all that powerful.

Live Action shows are limited by their budget, not by any power level wankery crap. Showing Hercules throwing mountains and stomping the ground so hard that it causes 10.0 earthquakes while Hades sends zombie dragons after him costs money. Lots of money. Sticking Hercules in a muscle suit and putting a grim-reaper looking guy in a headlock barely costs even a hundred dollars. By contrast these scenes always cost about the same amount of money between literature, video games, and animation and so they rarely resort to that Vanilla Action Hero crap.