Dueling Desires: unpleasable fanbase, not unpleasable fans

[Libertad]

In my "Consumer demand for caster dominance" thread, many posters suggested that a sizable portion of gamers want contradictory elements in their RPGs.

I think that the problem relates to a broken fanbase rather than fans who cannot ever be pleased. The latter exists to some extent (and the Internet can make their presence seem larger), but I think that many D&D fans have very specific ideas out of what they want out of the game in order to be satisfied. I have the opinion that the sandbox nature of D&D has led to a big tent of gamers, many of whom want very different things out of RPG games.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... bleFanbase

Examples:

There are gamers who WANT spellcasters to dominate and be better in every way. There are gamers who want classes relatively balanced against each other.

There are gamers who want a big sandbox of fantasy tropes and cultures, from pseudo-Asian to Arabian Nights-esque themes. There are gamers who want D&D to retain its Tolkienesque roots and do not want more "exotic" options like Dragonborn and Tieflings to predominate.

I think that narrowly focused RPGs can be positive, in that they have a specific design and offers this up front. D&D tries to be many things to many different people, and thus we get different expectations out of the game.

Thoughts?

[ishy]

I think you misunderstood what they meant.

Unless I'm mistaken they don't mean that different people want different things. Which is true but also so obvious to be irrelevant.

They mean more like: I want magic to be able to do anything (including breaking the game in half) and fighters will be limited by realism. But fighters should be just as good as casters!

And A & B can't both be true.

[Libertad]

They mean more like: I want magic to be able to do anything (including breaking the game in half) and fighters will be limited by realism. But fighters should be just as good as casters!

I may have misspoke. I meant to say that many gamers are aware of imbalance in 3rd Edition and: want equivalent power between classes or are happy with the imbalance. I think that the "noncasters must be bound by realism" advocates fall under the latter option.

I think that the mindset in the quote is a minority because trying to bring "realism" into D&D is doomed to failure. The "noncasters need to be realistic" argument is tossed around on D&D forums, but how many gamers see this as an attempt to lead to balance rather than an intentional attempt to make magic more powerful and "special?"

[ishy]

Honestly?

I hear it often. Too often, on forums and from people who are never on forums.
Their usual response to the imbalance is that the caster is just a powergamer.

It is the main reason I hate the fact that 3th isn't honest about some options obviously being weaker than other ones. Which coupled with that the designers being bat-shit crazy at other times makes things harder.

Because now I have to convince people that the designers of 3th editions are incompetent but still created a game that I love.


And the fact that 4th which was marketed as being more balanced, balances the game by making everyone look and feel the same makes it hard.

Though we could also look at pathfinder (core) which made casters stronger and mundanes weaker compared to the threats they are up against. With nerfing things they don't like the image off so hard that they become 100% useless.
Example: The spiked chain, they hate the image of people wielding it so here it is after the pf changes.

Spiked chain	Heavy flail
Exotic	martial
25 gp	15 gp
2d4 (average 5)	d10 (average 5.5)
x2	19-20 x2
P	B

Both trip & disarm 2h weapons without reach.

This is the result of people not liking "realism" on fighters.

[Username17]

It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

Where this gets problematic is when it bumps right next to their next demand, that the party is hitting 5th level and they still want to be limited to a benchmark that is essentially 4th level. And while at that point you can in fact keep things kind of hobbling along with the same character with bigger numbers, after a few levels of that it becomes untenable. When the player is asking for their character to be archetypically identical to a 4th level concept and asking to be mechanically balanced with 9th level casters, you're up Shit Creek.

That was the horrible revelation that was caused by the Tome Fighter. The harsh reality is that Mad Martigan is a 4th level character and the people who hold up Mad Martigan as the example are seriously not saying that they want higher level abilities that happen to be skinned as guts and luck, they are literally saying that they want to be quintessentially 4th level characters while being balanced with 9th level characters. It's an actually and actively contradictory thought pattern and there is no solution.

Contrariwise, the Tome Monk get accepted with hardly a blip. Some people quibble about it being overpowered. Some people even helpfully informed us that it was more powerful than a Core Monk. But people didn't tell us that any of it was out of theme. Because the Monk theme is one which can in fact continue growing until it's Goku. Similarly, "Wizard" is a character concept that just keeps growing forever. Your summoner summons electric rat, and then he summons a storm crow, and then he's summoning a thunder dragon. No one bats an eye at this shit.

But Fighter players seriously do get annoyed and even offended when their character can beat up an elephant with their bare hands. Also they get annoyed and offended when they notice that the other characters are more powerful than they are. It really is cognitive dissonance, and the solution is to force people to abandon the Fighter concept after a few levels. Mandatory PrCs is the only way to get people to accept their own character having level appropriate abilities at high level.

-Username17

[Libertad]

I believe that anyone who wants to constrain noncasters with "realism" don't care about balance. I believe that they WANT spellcasters to dominate. I believe that Tome of Battle was a base breaker because it made martial classes with "spellcaster-ish" abilities.

I remember viewing a video by the Spoony One (Leaping Wizards) regarding imbalance in D&D. He said that he enjoyed D&D because of class imbalance; at low levels in 2nd edition, wizards were very weak in comparison to the martial guys. High-level wizards, by definition, were very lucky to have survived past 11th level. Thus, being a high-level Wizard was a reward by itself. This is what I think the spellcaster dominance comes from: an appeal to tradition in an attempt to "reward" lucky players.

But there was a demand to address imbalance in 3rd Edition. Many players were aware of things like CoDzilla, Planar Binding cheese, and Save Or Die abilities. And thus this is where the controversy stems from: two customer bases who want different things for the game.

[TheFlatline]

In addition, don't forget that the high end of fighters, shit you see in greek mythology as the sons of gods and shit, is literally like level 9 *tops* with a few unusual quirks here and there..

When I say that fighters are too "anime" and it's annoying, I'm not talking about physics defying, teleport-by-slicing-through-reality mechanics, I'm talking the flavor text that is a blatant, literal, lazy ripoff of Asian stereotypes.

I really don't want to play Naruto in a Euro-centric fantasy setting. Come up with something that sort of follows Euro-Fantasy concepts and run with it until it breaks, and I'm fine. But I don't give a shit about chi, ninja, and samurai wankery in a Tolkein-esque setting. Either change up the setting or change up the character flavor.

[TheFlatline]

I believe that anyone who wants to constrain noncasters with "realism" don't care about balance. I believe that they WANT spellcasters to dominate. I believe that Tome of Battle was a base breaker because it made martial classes with "spellcaster-ish" abilities.

I remember viewing a video by the Spoony One (Leaping Wizards) regarding imbalance in D&D. He said that he enjoyed D&D because of class imbalance; at low levels in 2nd edition, wizards were very weak in comparison to the martial guys. High-level wizards, by definition, were very lucky to have survived past 11th level. Thus, being a high-level Wizard was a reward by itself. This is what I think the spellcaster dominance comes from: an appeal to tradition in an attempt to "reward" lucky players.

But there was a demand to address imbalance in 3rd Edition. Many players were aware of things like CoDzilla, Planar Binding cheese, and Save Or Die abilities. And thus this is where the controversy stems from: two customer bases who want different things for the game.

That's oversimplifying magic in 2nd edition. There were casting times and shit that modified when your spell actually went off, and *hitting the mage with a thrown rock* could fizzle that fireball if you got an attack before the wizard did. Therefore, fighters had an incredibly important job in AD&D: They kept the spellcasters from getting interrupted. Not necessarily from getting geeked, but from taking damage and losing a spell. It's okay that as a fighter you're never going to do 10d6 of AOE damage in one round. Why? Because without you the wizard *never* would either. On top of that, as has been repeatedly mentioned, a fighter with a longsword attacking a troll is attacking something with a fraction of the hitpoints 3rd & 4th edition monsters have.

I seriously wonder if introducing casting times back into 3rd, using a "fluid" initiative system, would work. Every spell has a casting time. You started casting on your initiative, but the spell didn't actually go off until your init - casting time. So a fireball has a casting time of say 5. Your init is a 12. You cast your fireball, it goes off on initiative count 7. Anyone acting between 7 & 12 can actually attack you and you get to make a concentration check, DC 10 (or 15) + total damage suffered that round in order to keep casting. So if you get hit three times for 4, 12, and 7 points of damage, you're making concentration DC checks of 19, 31, and 38 respectively.

You could still totally have spells take full round actions too. It's not that big of a deal.

The overpowered nature of casters in 3rd always seemed to me to come from the fuckerated initiative system and the super-fast casting system. There's no more counter-magic starting in 3rd (there is but it's fucking idiotic how it works), there's hardly any attacking the mage to interrupt spells (unless it's an attack of opportunity). 99% of spells go off uninterrupted in 3rd, which seems incredibly overpowered.

When you can have a single caster as the BBEG and hold his own against 4 PCs, there is something terribly, fundamentally wrong with your system, because "Magic Has Won".

[NineInchNall]

It is certainly true that at 6th level there is serious and undeniable disconnect between the action economies of casters and noncasters. 6th level is when the full BAB characters get their first iterative attack and suddenly go from getting their entire offense from a standard action to getting it from a full round action. Casters never make this switch.

But this is yet another example of the cognitive dissonance that gamers have regarding the noncaster stuff. By way of illustration, way-back-when I suggested on myth-weavers that high level noncasters should be able to take out CR<level opponents as a standard action. No one agreed. Srsly.

People want their warriors to be as competent as the spellcasters, but they refuse to allow their warriors the tools with which to compete.

And they'll complain that I used the word compete, because D&D is a cooperative rather than competitive game and I'm a fucking munchkin.

[TheFlatline]

D&D is a cooperative game, but you will compete with NPCs built as PCs. So viewing D&D as a competitive game between PC builds is totally acceptable. In fact, it's a good testing environment.

I still maintain that it's not just that martial classes are underpowered. They obviously are. But I also maintain that the way magic functions, in it's "it always goes off and you can't *really* defend against it or prevent a spell from going off" variation in 3rd and higher is a HUGE boost to magic.

Fighters are still going off of the "high risk high reward" paradigm. Take a penalty to attack and do more damage. Shit like that. Magic users absolutely don't have that. In fact, the higher lower the risk (higher spells) the higher the reward tends to be (damage output or knot cutting). Even when you save, you're often saving for half damage, which is on par with the damage output of martial classes. So your low risk/high reward paradigm still rewards better than high risk/high reward scenarios for non casters.

What I'm afraid of is that 10 years of that paradigm discrepancy for magic users has made it a scared cow.

[Swordslinger]

What I'm afraid of is that 10 years of that paradigm discrepancy for magic users has made it a scared cow.

I don't know. People are generally okay with spells getting nerfed, as evident by Pathfinder's popularity. So long as you keep their vancian spell level system and the spell list from other editions, it seems genuinely okay. Even if finger of death is ass, as long as they see a spell called "Finger of Death" on the list, they will be okay with it. Even if it can barely kill anyone but weak minions.

The main selling point that the fanbase seems to constantly resist is anime fighters. They want Conan and Aragorn, not Goku. Sadly the best solution may simply to make fighter a 5 level class and force people to take something high powered. While plenty of people will flip tables over fighters doing magical things, nobody will blink if the Lightning Blade PrC can do anime stunts. The goal then would simply be forcing people to take lightning blade.

[Daztur]

What's especially hilarious is looking at the Epic Level Handbook and comparing what it lets casters and non-casters do. Casters get to become gods, non-casters get to splice rope.

[NineInchNall]

What's especially hilarious is looking at the Epic Level Handbook and comparing what it lets casters and non-casters do. Casters get to become gods, non-casters get to splice rope.

This really sums it up, to be honest. It's even a corollary to F&K's races of war rant on the failure of feats. People are willing to accept the one (doing crazy shit) and not the other (doing crazy shit), though, and that's the fundamental problem.

[FatR]

That's oversimplifying magic in 2nd edition. There were casting times and shit that modified when your spell actually went off, and *hitting the mage with a thrown rock* could fizzle that fireball if you got an attack before the wizard did. Therefore, fighters had an incredibly important job in AD&D: They kept the spellcasters from getting interrupted. Not necessarily from getting geeked, but from taking damage and losing a spell. It's okay that as a fighter you're never going to do 10d6 of AOE damage in one round. Why? Because without you the wizard *never* would either.

But that's wrong. I wish people will stop sprouting such retardation about the edition where complete and utter fighter obsolescence after 9th level was actually planned by authors, just because they never playerd it after 9th level, as levels after 9th were mostly meant for overpowered NPCs.

In fact, even a low level wizard in AD&D also had excellent chances of wiping a floor with a low-level fighter one-on-one. His spells were way faster than longsword and had about a 80% chance of knocking a fighter out cold. Classic low-levels SoLs all had much better effect those times.

And unless you were seriously unlucky, spell interruption largely stopped to be a problem after 7-8th level, except when facing teams with other spellcasters on board, capable of taking down your defences.

What people wanted from fighters was sustainability, because AC actually meant something those days and you were supposed to regularly fight fucktons of weak enemies, spending spells on which was wasteful. Of course, that often no longer mattered once you were able to rouinely bypass hordes of mooks with invisibility + flight or some other shit. It certainly no longer mattered once your wizard got your 6-th level spells and with them the ability to get yourself some meatshields by making normal or extraplanar people his bitches forever.

[hogarth]

It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

It's not just fighters -- you get the same contradictory bullshit with wizards. For instance, great wizards should be like Gandalf (who never uses any powerful magic when anyone's watching) and they should also be like the wizards from the Dying Earth books (who are casting Time Stop and creating flying castles and shit like that).

[TheFlatline]

That's oversimplifying magic in 2nd edition. There were casting times and shit that modified when your spell actually went off, and *hitting the mage with a thrown rock* could fizzle that fireball if you got an attack before the wizard did. Therefore, fighters had an incredibly important job in AD&D: They kept the spellcasters from getting interrupted. Not necessarily from getting geeked, but from taking damage and losing a spell. It's okay that as a fighter you're never going to do 10d6 of AOE damage in one round. Why? Because without you the wizard *never* would either.

But that's wrong. I wish people will stop sprouting such retardation about the edition where complete and utter fighter obsolescence after 9th level was actually planned by authors, just because they never playerd it after 9th level, as levels after 9th were mostly meant for overpowered NPCs.

In fact, even a low level wizard in AD&D also had excellent chances of wiping a floor with a low-level fighter one-on-one. His spells were way faster than longsword and had about a 80% chance of knocking a fighter out cold. Classic low-levels SoLs all had much better effect those times.

And unless you were seriously unlucky, spell interruption largely stopped to be a problem after 7-8th level, except when facing teams with other spellcasters on board, capable of taking down your defences.

What people wanted from fighters was sustainability, because AC actually meant something those days and you were supposed to regularly fight fucktons of weak enemies, spending spells on which was wasteful. Of course, that often no longer mattered once you were able to rouinely bypass hordes of mooks with invisibility + flight or some other shit. It certainly no longer mattered once your wizard got your 6-th level spells and with them the ability to get yourself some meatshields by making normal or extraplanar people his bitches forever.

I don't know where the hell you got the 9th level shit from. My point was that traditional European fantasy (which is what D&D cribs from most) runs out of analogs for martial classes fairly early, while Eastern fantasy sort of keeps up a little bit longer. That's all. Not that the game wasn't meant to progress past 9th level.

Otherwise you more or less are agreeing with me, with the caveat that shit like spell interruption became less of an issue at higher levels. Which I'll agree with.

Still, the point remains that there was *SOMETHING* that could be done to help mitigate casters. As you said, since AC wasn't open ended it actually meant something, which was also a mitigation, but 3rd edition said "fuck that noise" and made sure that 99.9% of your spells go off, always and made it feasible to have AC in the 40s or 50s.

[Lokathor]

You know, there are readied actions in the game. There's rules for when a readied action hits you while casting a spell. Just fiddle with a version of those rules, yoink out Defensive Casting as an option, and you have heavily interruptable spells right back in 3e.

Except no one likes their class features getting interrupted when they use them; caster or not.

[Ice9]

As has been said before, combat balance is not the real issue - it's not hard to make warriors that stab really well, even in comparison to disintegration rays. At worst, you need to put weak points you can attack for massive damage on monsters that are too physically huge to "realistically" chop apart.

Casting times don't change much outside of battle, so you still get the same problems there.

I'm in favor of "realistic warrior finishes at 5th level, pick a direction (PrC) to go from there", because there's no one approach that's going to work for everyone. You can go:
* Hero of destiny
* Imbued warrior
* Gadgeteer / artifact wielder
* Mythic / metaphoric (I'm so strong I rip the curse in half)
* Kludge master (I use wands by stabbing stuff with them)
And probably some more routes. Each of those is going to be the perfect solution for some people, and totally abhorrent for others, so you may as well let people choose.

[TheFlatline]

As has been said before, combat balance is not the real issue - it's not hard to make warriors that stab really well, even in comparison to disintegration rays. At worst, you need to put weak points you can attack for massive damage on monsters that are too physically huge to "realistically" chop apart.

This is a terrible idea. It's so overused and cliche that even videogames are shying away from "attack the big glowing red spot for extra damage".

[FatR]

Otherwise you more or less are agreeing with me,

Not at all. You ranted about spell interruption as if it was counter to caser domination. It wasn't. Fighter obsolescence happened 2-3 levels later than in 3.X, tops, and fighter relevancy was mostly not even due to spell interruption. You still had single wizard BBEGs bitchslapping 4-man parties by themselves. In spades.

And I forgot another thing where you're wrong: while wizards had hardes time surviving at low levels, everyone else wasn't much better off, because low levels were a luck-based mission, where you was supposed to lose characters and generate them anew.

[Ice9]

As has been said before, combat balance is not the real issue - it's not hard to make warriors that stab really well, even in comparison to disintegration rays. At worst, you need to put weak points you can attack for massive damage on monsters that are too physically huge to "realistically" chop apart.

This is a terrible idea. It's so overused and cliche that even videogames are shying away from "attack the big glowing red spot for extra damage".

I think you misunderstand me - I'm not talking about literal glowing target points, I'm just saying that:
* Some people can't handle the concept that a "warrior" could slice through the torso of a 50' tall iron statue.
* The whole issue can be avoided by saying that a strike that kills said statue is hitting a vital point, rather than doing massive physical damage.
* Therefore, foes that are both large and homogeneous should be avoided, if you're trying to support the aforementioned people.

[icyshadowlord]

It is certainly true that at 6th level there is serious and undeniable disconnect between the action economies of casters and noncasters. 6th level is when the full BAB characters get their first iterative attack and suddenly go from getting their entire offense from a standard action to getting it from a full round action. Casters never make this switch.

But this is yet another example of the cognitive dissonance that gamers have regarding the noncaster stuff. By way of illustration, way-back-when I suggested on myth-weavers that high level noncasters should be able to take out CR<level opponents as a standard action. No one agreed. Srsly.

People want their warriors to be as competent as the spellcasters, but they refuse to allow their warriors the tools with which to compete.

And they'll complain that I used the word compete, because D&D is a cooperative rather than competitive game and I'm a fucking munchkin.

I've had this happen over and over with people I know, so I've almost completely stopped trying to convince people. It's sad.

And I still can't wrap my head around the fact that a friend of mine honestly and seriously thinks casters needed the boost they got in Pathfinder and that melee (I am not joking) is overpowered, and he's actually played both 3.5e and Pathfinder in his times. HE EVEN SAID THAT MONK IS ONE OF THE BEST CLASSES OUT THERE!!

[nockermensch]

The solution for this, of course, is to make the Mahabharata required reading for prospective martial players.

No wait, this would be Exalted.

[RobbyPants]

As has been said before, combat balance is not the real issue - it's not hard to make warriors that stab really well, even in comparison to disintegration rays. At worst, you need to put weak points you can attack for massive damage on monsters that are too physically huge to "realistically" chop apart.

This is a terrible idea. It's so overused and cliche that even videogames are shying away from "attack the big glowing red spot for extra damage".

I think you misunderstand me - I'm not talking about literal glowing target points, I'm just saying that:
* Some people can't handle the concept that a "warrior" could slice through the torso of a 50' tall iron statue.
* The whole issue can be avoided by saying that a strike that kills said statue is hitting a vital point, rather than doing massive physical damage.
* Therefore, foes that are both large and homogeneous should be avoided, if you're trying to support the aforementioned people.

That could just be handled by the description of the attack by the DM. So, when you hit and deal enough damage to kill something, but your sword is only long enough to go a third of the way through the monster's body, the DM can say things like:

"You strike the golem's torso and fissures begin to spread like a spider web, until it crumbles to pieces"

or

"You cut the dragon's throat, apparently hitting a major artery. It bleeds to death in moments before your eyes."


So, the "weak spot" is hit post hoc by simply dealing enough damage to kill the beast.

[TheFlatline]

Otherwise you more or less are agreeing with me,

Not at all. You ranted about spell interruption as if it was counter to caser domination. It wasn't. Fighter obsolescence happened 2-3 levels later than in 3.X, tops, and fighter relevancy was mostly not even due to spell interruption. You still had single wizard BBEGs bitchslapping 4-man parties by themselves. In spades.

And I forgot another thing where you're wrong: while wizards had hardes time surviving at low levels, everyone else wasn't much better off, because low levels were a luck-based mission, where you was supposed to lose characters and generate them anew.

I'm not suggesting that it's the cure-all, but it *is* a tool. My ultimate point is that there is *no* downside to magic starting in 3.x. It's just flat superior in every way possible. Why? Well... just because the devs dig magic.

Nobody's sat down and thought of even a partial counter to magic, either in character or mechanically. The solution apparently is to throw up your hands and get your own wizards, starting a magical arms race, and hope to god they're okay serving you and don't get power aspirations of their own, which seems to me like a terrible solution even in theory.