The Mundane Melee fighter can go fuck himself.

[John Magnum]

No, see, there would still be causality, it's exactly like magic except you don't call it magic and it's powered by big muscles and pushups instead of big beards and scrolls.

[Chamomile]

See, the thing is you're making a thread about how Fighters can't compete if they're anything similar to mundane and how they need magic powers to keep up. You are justifying this by saying that people on other forums do not yet agree with this concept. The trouble is, you are making this thread on the Den, where people already do agree with this concept. If you wanted to be useful, you would make this thread either on one of those other forums where it isn't preaching to the choir, or you'd make a thread here that has the need for Fighters to have supernatural powers as its premise, and is actually about how to go about convincing other people of this.

[Mistborn]

See, the thing is you're making a thread about how Fighters can't compete if they're anything similar to mundane and how they need magic powers to keep up. You are justifying this by saying that people on other forums do not yet agree with this concept. The trouble is, you are making this thread on the Den, where people already do agree with this concept. If you wanted to be useful, you would make this thread either on one of those other forums where it isn't preaching to the choir, or you'd make a thread here that has the need for Fighters to have supernatural powers as its premise, and is actually about how to go about convincing other people of this.

Have you not read what people have been posting in this thread and all the shitty threads before it. People on the Den do not agree that the mundane fighter is unworkable, these threads have the usual suspects whingeing about how the want to deepthroat Conan cock or level up into Baron Munchhausen. and this cancer infects other threads leading to things like "we can't have attack eagles because fighters" or "archers can't shoot across rivers because fighters".

[virgil]

People on the Den do not agree that the mundane fighter is unworkable, these threads have the usual suspects whingeing about how the want to deepthroat Conan cock or level up into Baron Munchhausen.

And that's why she keeps going on about fighters. Even Misty can't get her lips off Conan's sweet, sweet manhood; refusing to acknowledge actual solutions or doing anything else besides droning on and on about how bad the DMF is.

[Aryxbez]

I'd like to point out, that a popular paradigm that was getting mentioned for awhile, was to delay D&D to 10 levels, and thereafter require non-casters to pick up a Power source (even cool warrior ones like Wuxia, Ki, Souls, Pacts). You can still have some pretty cool stuff for Warrior-types (that D&D normally wouldn't allow, and would be amended) until Paragon comes around.

So you are basically saying nothing can ever be fixed if Pathfinder and 4E didn't fix it.

Considering he's referring to "The leaders of the Industry", people who have a cult to listen to them, Company staff to do mass editing, testing, and marketing to get this all done in a practical time frame. Then yes, it becomes bit harder to fix the problems at large, when the big heads are continuing the same outdated crap.

We've had a thread on us going out, saving the Fantasy RPG world, but are hampered by lack of funds to promote advertising, and monetary incentive to have designers/artists.

To which I reply if you didn't write the power to be broad enough to apply to various situations in your TTRPG it is your failure as a designer. Yeah it's easy to say "it's just magic" but saying that physical non phlebitonium super powers can't be written to be just as viable is just laziness talking.

It's not just laziness on part of the designer, but what ye have to get past the DM. Even if it has multiple functions, that ability is only going to be able to do its strict function for the most part, and most DM's will be unbending to it in a way they wouldn't with Magic. Otherwise, I do agree that a designer should seek to design abilities that can do multiple, fun things, especially for warrior-types.

No, see, there would still be causality, it's exactly like magic except you don't call it magic and it's powered by big muscles and pushups instead of big beards and scrolls.

(Ex) Based superpowers like the [Tome] Soldier, while appealing to me, still has the above problem mentioned and here's an example.

[OgreBattle]

And you could make stats so that that sword guy/BMX bandit, comes out with a 50% chance of winning, but then you have to deal with the headache of figuring out how in the nine hells that "mundane guy" is actually able to do anything at all to the dragon and still run of RAELISM.

Pick any of the following:
"He has an artifact sword attuned to killing that specific dragon and the dragon decided to land and trade blows with him"
"He has the legendary armor forged by dragonfire that makes him immune to dragonfire and dragonmagic and dragonclaws"
"The wizard/cleric buffed him"
"MY PC's roleplay like the goddamn Batman and don't need your fucking min/max cheaty bullshit, fuck you denners, FUCK YOU!!"

[darkmaster]

I would go with "it's a world that has infinite energy in the form of elemental planes and people can make stone walls out of thin air so obviously physics as we know them don't apply."

[Prak]

Thor is basically a half ogre with better intelligence if he doesn't have his hammer, but he's "Worthy"-- even the Hulk can't lift it.

I thought it was because Thor was strong enough to lift it.

Nope, he literally has to be judged worthy to lift it. I suppose there's the early stuff in the Thor movie where he's throwing it around while it's un-enchanted, but if he were that strong, he'd only need it to use his powers. Thor is definitely not actually that strong.

I always kinda figured Loki's just a Beguiler who happens to have stupidly good physical attributes/defenses via MC favoritism/Jotun template. No gnarly sneak attack--he'd rather gloat than insta-gib--just Armored & Surprise Spellcasting plus enough raw Strength and evocation items to do a middling job of being his own beat stick once he's established battlefield control.

He does more rogue-ish stuff in the new movie. He backstab's a guy, which seems to be pretty damned near enough to kill this hulking avatar of death, but is really just using it as a distraction to activate a black hole grenade on the guy's belt.

[Username17]

No, see, there would still be causality, it's exactly like magic except you don't call it magic and it's powered by big muscles and pushups instead of big beards and scrolls.

The problem is that if you don't call it magic and have it be powered by push-ups, it's inherently inferior to things that are called magic.

Imagine that you have two character powers, one of which is called "Arrow Storm" and is a Martial Power where you shoot a bunch of arrows; while the other is called "Destruction Bolt" and is an Arcane Power where you shoot a blast of mystic force. Let's say that the actual text of those powers is literally exactly the same: they both do an amount of damage to every target in a straight line out to some range. Let's say the range and damage and attack versus defense paradigms are all exactly the same. Game mechanically, no difference - and in a computer game the two powers would be totally interchangeable. But the Destruction Bolt is still better in table top, because it's magic and Arrow Storm isn't.

Let's say you noticed one day that your attack did a fuck tonne of damage and you wanted to get to the other side of the dungeon. So you point your line attack power right at the cave wall and start tunneling. Now the rules don't actually say what happens at this point, and the power descriptions are pretty vague. In the computer game, nothing would happen at all, because the cave wall wasn't programmed to be destructible and that would be the end of that. But in the table top RPG you can point out that stone has a toughness and your attack does enough damage to destroy some amount of the stone, and it's an area attack, so you should jolly well destroy all the stone and have yourself a tunnel going all the way in. And if you were casting Destruction Bolt, that would probably be exactly what happened. While if you were casting Arrow Storm, your damage to the stone would probably just get calculated once and you'd burrow a few inches or feet. Because the fact that Arrow Storm is not "magic" means it defaults to much more restrictive physics when you try to use it in an out-of-the-box way.

But it's not just that "non-magic" powers have a harder time being used for emergent knot-cutting shenanigans, they have a harder time being used for things they explicitly do in their writeup. Consider the historical example of Improved Evasion as opposed to the magical equivalents like Protection from Energy or Fire Shield. In either case, the rules are that to an incoming load of dragon breath, you take half the normal damage if you fail your save and none of the damage if you make your save. As the Wizard with the magical forcefield, that just fucking happens. No discussions or arguments. It says you take less damage, you take less damage and we move on to the next player's turn. But Improved Evasion has potential caveats. If the dragon's breath hit every square in the room, or the Rogue was in the middle of it and the distance to the edge was greater than his movement, the DM might balk. Certainly, long arguments have been had about whether or not Improved Evasion should apply in such a circumstance. You could be in for a long argument about raelizarm and designer intent and square measurment. There is a non-zero chance that the DM will deny your Improved Evasion and make you take unreduced damage. The Abjuration magic is better because it's magic, and the Improved Evasion is worse because it is not.

Because if your power is Magic, you get to say:



And if your power is not Magic, you don't get to say that. And that makes your power noticeably worse in an actual tabletop environment. Every word you have to spend explaining how is a word you don't get to use explaining what because there is a finite amount the DM is going to consider.

Table Top Role Playing Games have magical teaparty elements that board games and computer games do not have. And having your powers be based on pushups and shit is demonstrably a disadvantage in those magical teaparty portions of the game.

-Username17

[Maxus]

A World of Magic

The thing you've got to understand about the D&D world, is that it's magical. Not that it has magic in it, but that everything is literally magical to a greater or lesser extent. Magic is the source material of everything, and the junk's like radiation--little bits of 'loose' magic are everywhere, just hardly noticeable. Magic isn't quite scientific though, because it's influenced by thoughts and feelings and all that jazz. The D&D universe is a dualistic universe where, yes, things do have souls, and souls can be tinkered with, but emotions and thoughts and expectations and the like all make their own influences, and, well, there's noblemen who can't take the least bit of hardship without wanting to jump out a tower with the point of their sword held in their teeth. An inherent degree of volatility and unpredictability is in magic, is what I'm saying.

While general patterns can be observed, their specifics are still very much shrouded in mystery, no least because magical academia hasn't yet figured out a magic microscope. Or, indeed, the microscope.

For whatever reason, magic accumulates into people and creatures that go and do a lot of things, travel around and get in fights and have adventures. Maybe they just passively soak up more magic from travelling through it, but probably because defeating something releases a burst of magic that earths itself in the nearest concentrations of mana, which is usually going to be what just kicked its ass. But the point is, strong people and strong creatures are inherently more magical than weaker ones. Even people who don't overtly -use- it, benefit from it. A fighter gets tougher, stronger, faster. He begins to process quickly-evolving situations more and more easily. Career thieves get sneakier and more skilled.

In general, it can be said that magic turns the volume up on whatever something is. So warriors get mightier. Paladins smite harder and become more saintly as they go on. Blackguards get more and more corrupt, until their eyes burn red and they can't understand anyone performing an act of simple kindness.

There's a final note: If enough people think something is a certain way, it'll eventually become that. This is why bards and other performers are so nice to get on the side of. If you're smart, you'll tip them to talk about how strong and smart and brave you are. If you aren't smart and piss them off, they'll tell stories and songs about how you are weak and stupid and got beaten. This principle also applies, for better or worse, to gods. In fact, a deity can possibly be defined as an entity which is more easily influenced by belief and thoughts about it.

And this is also why magic is so damn expensive. If you want to enchant something, it's got to come from somewhere. So you use gold and gems and rare materials, which are broken down and consumed during the enchanting process, because gold's incredibly dense and naturally has more mana per volume than most things (and that people think it's special doesn't hurt, either), and gemstones are in vogue because people think they're really special. And just like Dumbo's magic feather, thinking something's special makes it special enough for practical purposes.

[ishy]

Seriously. Not once (outside of the Den and some ADnD grognards on the other forums) has anyone ever put forward fucking realism as a limiting factor on a character class in DnD.

So I come once again to asking 'What the fucking fuck?' DnD has Fighters. They fight. Conceptually speaking, that's a pretty narrow and limited niche, sure. But nothing about that niche says they have to fight /and/ adhere to real world notions of accuracy and realism. At all. There's absolutely no correlation between DnD mundane and reality mundane because the first IS A MADE UP IMAGINARY TEA PARTY.

Really?
Without framing the discussion first, ask your friends: "How long should a lvl 10 (or 15 or whatever you prefer) fighter be able to dive underwater (hold his breath) without any magical equipment".

Because surprisingly many people will & do balk when mid-high level fantasy characters can hold their breath for longer than 3 minutes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Table Top Role Playing Games have magical teaparty elements that board games and computer games do not have. And having your powers be based on pushups and shit is demonstrably a disadvantage in those magical teaparty portions of the game.

-Username17

Any chance we can socially engineer the playerbase such that when recalcitrant DMs try to implement this in-game stealth nerf the players will be empowered to give MC the stink-eye and tell them to go fuck a chainsaw? And if said DM complains on a board or something, they get mocked and sneered at for making the game worse to satisfy their narrow prejudices?

Sort of like what we did for and to DMs who implement strength and intelligence penalties for female characters. Or racial level limits.

[Chamomile]

Sort of like what we did for and to DMs who implement strength and intelligence penalties for female characters.

The idea that an extension of the battle between misogyny and equality can be considered to be at all similar to the battle between good game design and bad just because they took place on the same message board is now going on the long list of stupid ideas you've had.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Chamomile, I know that you have some kind of mad-on for me, but don't you think that you overreached on that faux-zinger?

[Chamomile]

I don't have anything against you personally, you just say stupid things with alarming regularity. The fight against "women should have stat penalties in D&D" was won by appealing to the fact that the anti-feminist population of the average internet forum is dramatically outnumbered by the feminist population, because the idea that women should be able to vote is not exactly considered an extremist position anymore. So when someone says something stupid and also obviously anti-woman, it is very easy to get support to tear them apart. And do not give me some stupid rant about modern institutionalized misogyny. It exists by being non-obvious. Stat penalties for women is extremely obvious. There are exactly two places where that fight is hard to win: Corners of the internet created explicitly to promote misogyny and the 1970s. There are multi-million dollar organizations who exist for no other purpose except to argue that women should be treated as equals to men, and their evil counterparts are beaten back enough that they have to make arguments like "the wage gap doesn't count as inequality because etc." You are never going to see support for "realism should not be considered a limitation on characters in a high fantasy setting" as "women should be treated as equals of men" has right now. You are never even going to see as much support for anti-realism as feminism had in the 1970s, because feminism is a bigger deal and more people care about it. The misogynists were steamrolled by a zeitgeist that is fighting culture wars monumentally larger than anything a bunch of D&D fans were equipped to handle.

[OgreBattle]

I thought the solution was "Fighter (and every other core class) goes up to level X, then you pick a new class"

So you can be Conan up to when he stops being Conan and becomes Thor:

I'd like to point out, that a popular paradigm that was getting mentioned for awhile, was to delay D&D to 10 levels, and thereafter require non-casters to pick up a Power source (even cool warrior ones like Wuxia, Ki, Souls, Pacts). You can still have some pretty cool stuff for Warrior-types (that D&D normally wouldn't allow, and would be amended) until Paragon comes around.

*yep, like that

Legends and literature of awesome dudes from pre-Hollywood history fit into that framework well. But to use a single series... I like how Naruto has a bit from different tiers:

1-5
The non-ninja goons that showed up early. They wave swords threateningly and when a ninja is out of chakra, can be deadly.

6-10
Superhuman athleticism lets you dash unseen and even heal yourself and shoot waves of force, as seen by Rock Lee who goes head to head with magic users.

10+
Shit is crazy and high level ninjas have godzilla sized super-summons or final forms.

I really don't think Monk should be a level 1-5 class though. D&D monks are inspired by kungfu movies... but in those movies being able to jump really high and cut through rocks is what happens when you just SWORD REALLY GOOD. "mundane fighters" exist in that world too, they are low level mooks, or the hero at the beginning of his journey.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't have anything against you personally, you just say stupid things with alarming regularity.

Or instead of getting on your soapbox, you could've just taken my statement at face value where I asked about the mere feasibility of the project. Not the desirability or political importance. I thought the juxtaposition of such a cosmically unimportant topic like 'racial level limits' made that pretty clear. But continue fucking that chicken if it makes you feel like you've got one over me.

[Chamomile]

It's not my fault you say stupid things with enough frequency that I can't tell when you think equality and good design practices are similarly important issues. Hell, I'm still not convinced you aren't just backpedaling.

[Username17]

It's not my fault you say stupid things with enough frequency that I can't tell when you think equality and good design practices are similarly important issues. Hell, I'm still not convinced you aren't just backpedaling.

Dude, you quoted him out of context. The very next sentence was racial level limits, a similar game mechanical structure that has no applicable civil rights equivalent.

However, the answer to Lago's actual and fairly reasonable question is "No." Yes, we can grind down the disparity between magic and mundane - people complain a lot less about Evasion now than they did in 2001 - but it's never going to go away. Because stealth nerfs are unacknowledged. People let magic users do stuff with their powers because it "seems reasonable" while a mundane character with precisely the same power with a less magical flavor has to argue long and hard to do the same thing because it doesn't.

I think you're going to have more success fighting the other end of the problem: removing peoples' expectation that they could be a 15th level Commoner or 15th level Fighter. Hawkeye goes up to 5, Thor goes up to 15. I think people could get behind the idea that they couldn't be a "Daggermaster" or something lame and low concept like that at 11th level. I think it is actually a thing that could happen convincing people that at higher levels they have to be Wonder Woman and not Molpadia.

You could also throw in some compensatory places for stealth buffing and stealth nerfing by having some toothless flavor text about people not trusting witches or loving silver dragon knights or whatever. It's very unlikely that the stealth buffing and nerfing of all the characters would balance out in every game, but at least it wouldn't go in the same direction all the time.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

However, the answer to Lago's actual and fairly reasonable question is "No." Yes, we can grind down the disparity between magic and mundane - people complain a lot less about Evasion now than they did in 2001 - but it's never going to go away. Because stealth nerfs are unacknowledged. People let magic users do stuff with their powers because it "seems reasonable" while a mundane character with precisely the same power with a less magical flavor has to argue long and hard to do the same thing because it doesn't.

So I'm wondering: what does the graph of 'average power level of the game' versus 'how much people are going to cockblock mundane just-so superpowers that operate at the current level-appropriateness' look like? I don't imagine that it's flat since very few DMs are going to try to argue that a 4th level fighter with power attack shouldn't be allowed to try to cut through steel bars with a greatsword. Hell, I don't even imagine that it's monotonically increasing; after the game reaches a certain level of craziness, people just tend to throw their hands in the air and go 'sure, whatever' when asked if skeletons should be allowed to train themselves to shapeshift and fly.

Though, yeah, most of the problems of mundane superpowers originate at the middle power level. After all, number of people who whine that small rogues shouldn't be able to face-to-face melee sneak attack hill giants while also saying that they're fine with rogues being able to travel by clouds with enough ranks in Balance is nonzero.

[Chamomile]

It's not my fault you say stupid things with enough frequency that I can't tell when you think equality and good design practices are similarly important issues. Hell, I'm still not convinced you aren't just backpedaling.

Dude, you quoted him out of context. The very next sentence was racial level limits, a similar game mechanical structure that has no applicable civil rights equivalent.

How does this damage my position that Lago cannot tell the difference between arguments that revolve around civil rights and arguments that revolve around design practices? That context is, in fact, the entire point: That he evidently thinks the one is in the same category as the other.

[Username17]

It's not my fault you say stupid things with enough frequency that I can't tell when you think equality and good design practices are similarly important issues. Hell, I'm still not convinced you aren't just backpedaling.

Dude, you quoted him out of context. The very next sentence was racial level limits, a similar game mechanical structure that has no applicable civil rights equivalent.

How does this damage my position that Lago cannot tell the difference between arguments that revolve around civil rights and arguments that revolve around design practices? That context is, in fact, the entire point: That he evidently thinks the one is in the same category as the other.

Gender based attribute maximums weren't taken out of the game as a civil rights issue. They were taken out of the game as a game design issue. They left the game at the same time and for the same reason that the age related stat modifiers were taken out of the game.

Now, gender based attribute maximums are never coming back, and that is a civil rights issue in the 21st century. But it's just historical reality that when they didn't appear in 2nd edition AD&D it wasn't because of pressure from feminists, it was simply that they were scaling back the number of "trivial" character description decisions that affected your stats. We know this, because they were still putting out AD&D compatible projects that had gender based attribute caps for years. Dark Queen of Krynn has lower strength limits for women in 1992. Obviously they weren't bowing to the feminist lobby and opting for self censorship, because they never censored anything.

You're just historically full of shit. Lago's example was pretty good and you're being a twat. Stop it.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Hell, I'm still not convinced you aren't just backpedaling.

I'm pretty convinced given that backpedaling in this situation hits me as almost comically unnecessary.

However, the answer to Lago's actual and fairly reasonable question is "No." Yes, we can grind down the disparity between magic and mundane - people complain a lot less about Evasion now than they did in 2001 - but it's never going to go away. Because stealth nerfs are unacknowledged. People let magic users do stuff with their powers because it "seems reasonable" while a mundane character with precisely the same power with a less magical flavor has to argue long and hard to do the same thing because it doesn't.
-Username17

This. It's not like the MC is necessarily trying to be a dick in this situation, either. What we think of as "Magic" may have specific connotations and properties in a particular fantasy setting, but the common use of the word just means that shit be unexplained. If players come to me talking about how they want to run a generic game with "mundane" or "non-magical" characters, my first thought wouldn't be that what they actually want is abilities so powerful that they're effectively super powers.

[vagrant]

Bullshit. It's all magic. Mundane in DnD does not correspond to mundane in reality, and anyone who believes that it does or that it should is a hopeless wanker whose opinion I've long since discarded. 'Arrow Storm' and 'Destruction Bolt' DO THE EXACT SAME THING IN ALL SITUATIONS ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY'RE THE SAME POWERS. Whether that's BSing the MC with 'Naw man, I'm sooooooo sweet of an archer I can drill a tunnel with arrows/dark powers granted by the Demonic Archcardinal Zzat' or combat, you do not get to say 'It's magic so GTFO.' That is stupid and lazy and dis-empowering to people who like playing characters that aren't fucking magic.

The only motherfucking reason you would claim 'magic' is that it stretches people's suspension of disbelief less - but seriously, if they can't be imaginative enough to say 'Sure, you're that badarse of an archer/swordsman/mundane etc' they can go fuck themselves and not play Imagination Land, or go watch more Barney the fucking Purple Pedophiliac Dinosaur until the rainbows start spurting out of their cock.

[vagrant]

Bullshit. It's all magic. Mundane in DnD does not correspond to mundane in reality, and anyone who believes that it does or that it should is a hopeless wanker whose opinion I've long since discarded. 'Arrow Storm' and 'Destruction Bolt' DO THE EXACT SAME THING IN ALL SITUATIONS ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY'RE THE SAME POWERS. Whether that's BSing the MC with 'Naw man, I'm sooooooo sweet of an archer I can drill a tunnel with arrows/dark powers granted by the Demonic Archcardinal Zzat' or combat, you do not get to say 'It's magic so GTFO.' That is stupid and lazy and dis-empowering to people who like playing characters that aren't fucking magic.

The only motherfucking reason you would claim 'magic' is that it stretches people's suspension of disbelief less - but seriously, if they can't be imaginative enough to say 'Sure, you're that badarse of an archer/swordsman/mundane etc' they can go fuck themselves and not play Imagination Land, or go watch more Barney the fucking Purple Pedophiliac Dinosaur until the rainbows start spurting out of their cock.