Warlock, 3rd Edition (okay, let's make TOME a complete game)

[DrPraetor]

This has several strands which have appeared in different den threads, I'm trying to gather them all here. I am drafting Frank as dictator.

Step 0 - IP and naming conventions
The IP for Warlock is free for anyone to take who wants it. So, yoink! The game is called Warlock and all the terminology (a "fighter ability" rather than a "feat") is derived from Warlock.
A thorough search and cleanup will be required later on to adhere to fixed, sensible and freely available terminology, rather than abiding by any restrictions from the SRD.

Resource Management
The Resource Management system works thusly:

• you have a certain (small) number of rare moves which you can do each day.
• you have a certain (larger) number of uncommon moves which you can do each day.
• you can take as many common moves in a day as you want.

The total number of these moves you can make is generally determined by your character level. Moves are an abstraction representing a combination of fatigue, luck, and preparation/opposition research.
This system is not dissonant, that is, the characters within the fantasy game world knows things work this way, even if they do not know the numerical specifics. This is actually easy to believe for fantasy-land inhabitants who are more or less human; real people in the real world believe that they have some finite supply of luck which they use up, and have to go refresh whenever they experience good fortune, even though this is not in reality true. So in a fantasy world where it is true people would have an easy time dealing with it.

Abilities and Classes
You select a number of abilities as you go up in level. Each ability actually gives you a series of increasing benefits as you rise in level - so the fighter ability Slayer lets you take bonus attacks when you fell people, then lets you take more bonus attacks when you fell people, etc. etc. without having to buy the other benefits in the series.

Abilties do come off of lists, most of which are related to the four core classes:

• Cleric
  Fighter
  Magic-User
  Thief

thus, Clerics get cleric abilities as they rise in level, Thieves get thief abilities as they rise in level, and so forth. There are also secondary classes, which get a mangled/hybrid progression of abilities from one of the four core classes. The secondary classes are as follows:

• Assassin - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from a restricted list of fighter abilities and thief abilities
  Druid - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from nature abilities, and a restricted list of cleric abilities and magic-user abilities
  Illusionist - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from a restricted list of magic-user abilities and thief abilities
  Monk - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from a restricted list of magic-user abilities and fighter abilities
  Ranger - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from nature abilities, and a restricted list of thief abilities and fighter abilities
  Necromancer - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from magic-user abilities and cleric abilities.
  Paladin - gets a fixed menu of abilities, then chooses from cleric abilities and fighter abilities

In addition, there are special classes which are available only to demons, fay and undead. They are:

• Demon - gets to choose special demon abilities, and make a few evil selections drawn from the various lists.
  Fay - gets to choose nature abilities mostly, but also a few thematic selections drawn from the various lsits.
  Undead - gets to choose special undead abilities.

Fixing the Fighter
Races of War provides a hotfix under which fighters are kinda playable.

That's a start but it's nowhere near good enough.

Fact is, the 13th level TOME fighter is still not good enough to beat up level-appropriate opposition, while a 13th level wizard knows Force Cage. Force Cage is a nice spell because it makes 3rd level spell slots useful - you sit the monster in a Force Cage and throw fireballs at it until it stops moving.

Anyway, let's take as a standpoint that the 13th level magic user is going to be nerfed slightly, if at all. Our challenge is now to give 13th level fighters things to do which:

• [1] are officially exceptional in nature, rather than magical
  [2] involve being a guy, with weapons, who is personally bad-ass
  [3] provide tactical advantages comparable with those provided by a wizard of the same level.

I'm running out of time for the day but this is the big design challenge in order to make Warlock 3rd edition worth doing. This is the real problem for D&D 4th and D&D 5th editions - not that they are bad games (although they are), but that they are unnecessary games because D&D 3rd edition was pretty good as far as D&D goes and improving on it is going to take some real work.

But, basically, we want to take the following character concepts and make sure they have some way, even if it requires some changes in set-up (like acquiring a flying mount or something) to stay current in the world of wizards who have force cage.

• I'm a guy, I have a two handed axe. At low levels I can do some standing-around and blocking, but mainly I run over to enemies and chop them in half. At higher levels, I'm either useless or I'm a clean-up crew for the wizard, I need something to contribute in my own right.
• I'm gender-ambiguous, I have a spear, and maybe also a shield. At low levels I stand around and monsters that try to get past me I get to stab them for free, which generally drops them. At higher levels, monsters just ignore this, I need something to do.
• I'm a girl, and I have a bow. At low to medium levels I'm a killing machine, and I'm useful at countering enemy wizards, and there are some encounters I can take all by myself by being-across-the-river-from-them. As we rise higher in level I transition from PC puzzle monster/support-staff to footnote, I need bonuses or alternative approaches or something so that I stay relevant.

So if we're going to do this at all we need to really fix these issues, rather than just taking the content of Races of War and fleshing it out into a full PHB.

In some ways, this requires a fundamental shift in the way things are handled. High level opposition tends to be demons and stuff, and just for starters we need to remove the rule where "high level opposition is immune to all your mundane stuff" because then mundane characters are useless against high level opposition by definition.

But even that isn't enough of a fix, we need high level fighters to be able to do really amazing things in a fight. "Stabbing twice as many guys as a 5th level fighter, half again as hard" just doesn't cut it, people. Even giving the fighter +5 ft of reach and the ability to shrug off status effects doesn't cut it.

This is the kind of ability that would cut it:
[*] A 13th level magic-user, cleric and fighter are attacked by level-appropriate "challenging" opposition - a gang of 8 dread wraiths (16HD undead), in two groups of four, flanking the party on each side.
[*] The cleric gets to cast Repulsion, probably at around DC 24, so wraiths who try to approach have a ~50% chance of failing.
[*] The magic-user can do all kinds of things, but let's keep it simple with Control Undead (should get a wraith which you can use next turn) and a quickened Halt Undead (should get 2 wraiths in the other group). He'd probably be better off with a Wall of Force, though.
[*] So 2-3 wraiths are going to try and enter melee with our heroes from different sides, and their Con damage means the Magic-user is not going to cast any spells this fight if they get through. If the Fighter is going to contribute proportionally to the cleric, he ought to be able to stop the remaining wraiths, by zipping around the battlefield and simultaneously using his weapon to hold them off.

[Bigode]

This and the previous one are the best trolls ever made on this forum (suck on it, Frantic). I'd certainly strangle you if I were in the correct country.

[John Magnum]

In your secondary classes, you've got Cleric/Magic-User twice and no Cleric/Thief. I assumed from having six secondary classes you were going for one of each possible primary class pairing.

[Endovior]

Two problems with that particular point.

For one thing, there are two Cleric-Mages and two Fighter-Thieves.

For the other, there are seven secondary classes.

I'd note that one of each of the duplicated hybrids are 'nature' classes, whatever that's supposed to mean.

That said, if it's important to have a class available for each hybrid pick, I'd nominate the Ninja as the hybrid Cleric-Thief.

[DrPraetor]

You could have the Ninja be a cleric/thief if you wanted and cared. I don't - Frank's opinion on having a power-source be "chinky-eyed" is well established. The cleric-thief hybrid could be a

The important point is that Fighters need to be competitive with Wizards through level 16, while still being Fighters. If you can do that, you can drop the secondary classes entirely and just make people multi-class, or you can have twenty secondary classes including Hexblades (psychic/fighter), Duskblades (mage/fighter), Hexdagger(psychic/thief) and Duskdagger (mage/thief). None of that is crucial to the existential relevance of the whole project, which is what needs to be established.

Fighter relevance may involve a forced shift in character conception: maybe they need troops, so all high level Fighters just get leadership and a small army (who are also bad-ass, rather than being 1HD mooks). Maybe all high-level fighters need to fight mounted on scary monsters. Neither of these is quite a satisfactory solution.

So, if you can solve that problem, you can make a version of D&D that's enough better than D&D 3rd. If you can't solve that problem there's no benefit in assembling the TOME stuff into a D20 alternative because it will only be slightly better than D&D 3rd, and:
[*] The marginal cost of learning TOME instead of D&D 3rd will not be high enough to bother - this is why the TOME material is generally conservative, you'll notice. So the Undead TOME explicitly does not change the undead type, it just introduces new subtypes that fiddle with it.
[*] The marginal cost of actually writing the thing will not be high enough to bother. Obstacles to writing a comprehensive TOME start with - "it takes too much work to rework all the feats as ability progressions" and get worse from there. If you're going to half-ass it, you might as well just play D&D 5th, because they're going to half-ass it more than you ever could. If you're going to do a decent job, it's going to take like at least a year, probably more like two since we all have jobs.

So one thing I'm not hearing is a lot of convincing arguments that this entire project is really worth doing - which is more or less what Frank concluded some time ago, if y'all recall.

[Parthenon]

Back the fuck up. Look at the Game Design Flowchart as a basic idea. It gets vaguer and vaguer as it goes on, but its a good brainstorming start. When looking at classes, you look at how they interact with each other and how they help the game flow, and not at their power source. At the moment "Magic-user" tells me exactly diddly-squat about the abilities on that list.

Instead of deciding on "magic-user" or "nature" (which are two of the most bullshit things ever), decide on how you want the PCs to be able to affect the world.

Maybe you want the Wizard in combat to be summoning walls and creating ravines while conjuring hordes of creatures to fight for them. Outside of combat they create vehicles and animals to pull it, while creating bridges or stairs to evade obstacles. But they never cast fireballs, divination spells, or much else that would make them too wide a focus.

Maybe you want the Assassin to be tripping enemies, attacking when enemies open their guards to attack, using their abilities to distract them to negate their attacks, and using poison to reduce enemy effectiveness. Outside of combat they can intimidate, make fake documents, and use their contacts to find information.

It's stuff like that which is actually useful, and not breaking abilities down into arbitrary groups which are never defined and then assigning them to classes.

Creating ability groups and having classes choose from them is fine, as long as you define and describe the ability group and how it affects the world.

---

You also immediately need to decide on the power level of the game at all levels. How powerful are 1st level PCs compared to 5th level compared to 20th level? How much more can 20th level PCs affect the world, and how powerful are rare, uncommon and common abilities at each level?

[DrPraetor]

I'm sorry, I thought this was self-evident from the title. We're talking about a D&D revamp.

Magic-user tells you that magic-users can do, more-or-less, this. There may be some modification in there - maybe not every magic-user really gets to do all of those things; in previous versions of D&D there were various restrictions on how many spells a magic-user actually knew so that would be fine. But basically, magic-users make choices off of the list of magic-user spells which has changed only marginally since about 1975.

Nature powers give you the ability to turn into animals, and cast many of these spells here. Also I'd throw in the "Track" feat, stuff like that; but this is a marginal question compared to what you do about Fighters.

Now, if you wanted to do a Runequest redux - in which Sorcerers can do many of the things you describe but don't throw fireballs around - that might be perfectly good game.

But it wouldn't be what Frank & K's tomes propose to be, which is a better version of the classic which I will avoid naming.

Fair enough, I'll go through the game design flowchart for D&D. This is a fun exercise anyway:

STEP TWO:
Okay, we've got a KnightFighter, a Paladin, a Cleric, a RobberThief, a SorcererMagic-User, and an ArcherMonk.
The story is: we're going into an undergound apartment complex to murder all the inhabitants and take their stuff. We anticipate significant resistance.
The Fighter provides military/logistical know-how (for which he should provide some game-mechanical bonus, we'll get to that) and a superior capacity for personal violence.
The Paladin provides additional personal violence and also direct moral support in reinforcing the rightness of our course of action through his mere presence.
The Cleric reinforces the rightness of our cause through more intellectual avenues such as applied ethics (they are evil: it is right to murder them and take their stuff) and theology (they worship vile deities: they are better off murdered), and provides specialized skills in applied religion which will be needed to counter supernatural impediments.
The Thief provides out-of-the-box thinking and problem solving skills, an improved ability to interact with the environment, and a specific counter to mechanical/technological means of resistance which our adversaries may employ. Also the thief is good for more violence.
The Magic-user is a major force-multiplier with his enemy-incapacitating spells, and also has specialized knowledge in Arcane Lore and the like which will likely be required to take maximum advantage of our finds.
The Monk is either force or a force-multiplier depending on military needs, and can support the Cleric if any opposition decides to argue that we shouldn't be murdering them.

Well, the Monk is a bit thin.

STEP THREE:
Paladin/Thief/Monk - this party has a shortage of force-multiplier ability, but since all three characters will be in melee, the damage should be spread out pretty well.
The Monk is hopefully learned enough to at-least-attempt any challenge that requires lore or debate or something.

Fighter/Cleric/Magic-User - the Fighter is going to be taking a lot of punishment in this party, but with the Magic-User and the Cleric both providing support you should do at least okay.
Note that since we can't have any of the skill groups be absolutely essential, this will mean that Clerics will need at least some capacity to deal with Traps (which they've always had in D&D so that's fine.)

STEP FOUR:
Okay, so we go into a dungeon and murder a bunch of people. That's the storyline for our adventure. Oh, they live in a temple which is elemental and also evil, which is why we are murdering them.

Hey, the Fighter isn't actually any good at this! In fact, he mostly stands around with a big sword and a thumb up his ass.

Well, let's start over. Any suggestions?

[Endovior]

Note that I did say IF a Cleric-Thief is required. Multiclassing type subclasses aren't terribly important to focus on this early, except to note that they're things that people CAN do.

Off the top of my head, a good way to enforce Mage/Fighter parity is to pull out the Cold Iron thing... which is to say, worked metal is anathema to any sort of magical working; thus a Fighter in Full Plate has piles of spell resistance, and he can cut through Walls of Force and such just by hacking away, without even applying any special abilities. Crossbows, accordingly, are an excellent way to suppress mage-types, since in addition to making them worse at magic through pain and suffering, they also make them worse at magic due to having bits of magic-negating metal in them. So far as Clerics go, I'd be inclined to recommend that your standard Cleric not wear heavy armor, for that exact reason. Maybe Paladins can get around that a little, but you'll note that they aren't especially known as battle-casters... Monks, on the other hand, don't use armor at all, for the same reason.

Accordingly, mages in general can be as scary as they like... but with the advance of technology comes better metals... so people are getting wise to this and wearing metal headbands to protect against mind control, or adding metal plating to their walls to protect against artillery spells. If spell resistance is commonplace among intelligent, non-spellcasting threats, then mages are suddenly stepping on far fewer toes.

[DrPraetor]

Off the top of my head, a good way to enforce Mage/Fighter parity is to pull out the Cold Iron thing... which is to say, worked metal is anathema to any sort of magical working;

My first response to that is:
well, that's a nice game, but it's obviously not Vaults & Velociraptors.

On the other hand, V&V is a game in which Fighters are basically second-class citizens, so if you want to change that, you're going to need to make at least a few changes.

First issue, clearly, magical suits of armor and magical swords both exist and are made out of steel. You could explain that away by having such objects somehow repel spells but have it still be possible to enchant them - maybe by having dwarves carve runes into them or something and then the dwarves who make the magic swords aren't Magic Users. So I can see how that might work.

But I still don't view it as a satisfying solution. High level magic users get astonishing powers, even if they are counterable. High level fighters get to stand there and be immune to some (but presumably not all) of the stuff that Magic Users get to do. No, that just doesn't cut it - Fighters need to be able to do cool stuff themselves. Take the example of Fighter, MU and Cleric against six dread wraiths. So maybe the Fighter's Armor now makes him immune to dread wraith touches. That's nice, but if all that means is he gets to stand there safe while the MU gets his Con drained to 0, that's not really a step in the right direction.

[Chamomile]

This has several strands which have appeared in different den threads, I'm trying to gather them all here. I am drafting Frank as dictator.

This right here is where your project failed. You want to see this happen. Frank does not. You, not Frank, are the one who needs to be making executive design decisions because you are the one who will be following the design process closely enough to actually know which ones are best and which aren't. Frank may or may not do that, and might do so at some times and not at others, depending entirely on whether or not he feels like it at the moment, because at no stage did Frank decide that Warlock 3rd was going to be his pet project for the next two years (he's already working on H:AT).

If you want to get a specific project created, the very first thing you need to do is draft yourself dictator, even if the premise is ruthlessly pillaging Frank and his father's ideas.

[DrPraetor]

Actually, I have more or less come around to the position that I don't want to do this either.

It's too much work for too little marginal benefit; 3e is good enough.

[Username17]

The time will come, and soon, when the atrocious handling of the IP of D&D by WotC combined with the lack of a modern OGL combined with Pathfinder going increasingly crazy trying to protect their stolen IP from being itself stolen by others will drive wedges into the fanbase so severe that I can't get a game of D&D going.

I don't know what to do at that point. The marginal utility of writing one's own game will certainly rise as this goes on. That was certainly the case in the early 80s - AD&D was such a clusterfuck and the competing vesions like Arduin were so insane that you seriously might as well just write your own. Mike Mearls promised to return us to the early 80s, and I think he very well might. But then, it's also possible that a big player like Blizzard will simply decide that the world needs a table top game that isn't ass and make one.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

What's H:AT?

[Chamomile]

Heartbreaker: Asymmetric Threat. After Sundown, but for Shadowrun.

[koz]

What's H:AT?

[Something beginning with H]: Asymmetric Threat. It's Frank's-Better-Shadowrun system.

[virgil]

Pathfinder going increasingly crazy trying to protect their stolen IP from being itself stolen by others

Source?

[...You Lost Me]

Heartbreak: Asymmetric Threat. The Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker that has long threads here on IMHO.

[Korwin]

I am drafting Frank as dictator.

You do what?
How do you draft an Dictator?

I mean, yes you could look for an sock puppet and proclaim him dictator...
But Frank?

---

Now I think I should read the rest of your post?

---

Actually, I have more or less come around to the position that I don't want to do this either.

It's too much work for too little marginal benefit; 3e is good enough.

I got the impression that was the reason you wanted to draft Frank?

[Endovior]

Off the top of my head, a good way to enforce Mage/Fighter parity is to pull out the Cold Iron thing... which is to say, worked metal is anathema to any sort of magical working;

My first response to that is:
well, that's a nice game, but it's obviously not Vaults & Velociraptors.

On the other hand, V&V is a game in which Fighters are basically second-class citizens, so if you want to change that, you're going to need to make at least a few changes.

First issue, clearly, magical suits of armor and magical swords both exist and are made out of steel. You could explain that away by having such objects somehow repel spells but have it still be possible to enchant them - maybe by having dwarves carve runes into them or something and then the dwarves who make the magic swords aren't Magic Users. So I can see how that might work.

But I still don't view it as a satisfying solution. High level magic users get astonishing powers, even if they are counterable. High level fighters get to stand there and be immune to some (but presumably not all) of the stuff that Magic Users get to do. No, that just doesn't cut it - Fighters need to be able to do cool stuff themselves. Take the example of Fighter, MU and Cleric against six dread wraiths. So maybe the Fighter's Armor now makes him immune to dread wraith touches. That's nice, but if all that means is he gets to stand there safe while the MU gets his Con drained to 0, that's not really a step in the right direction.

Three possibilities occur offhand, progressively more radical.

1: Adding numbers and effects to items, or 'enchanting' from D&D proper, has nothing to do with actual spell magic. It's rune-crafting or alchemy or something that anyone can learn how to do, so someone's ability to make 'magic' items tells you nothing about their class.
2: Forget magic swords and armor entirely. Magic users have nothing to do with the stuff; Fighters who want high-level magic-type gear instead become super blacksmiths or whatnot, and gain the ability to smith starmetal and adamantium and orichalcum and such; getting awesome items that do awesome things and are STILL immune to magic. This is less like D&D, of course.
3: Advance the tech level a bit. Fighters and Thieves are now using guns, and crafting technological items... giving them much the same long-term flexibility and options as the mage-types. That said, this is so much less like D&D that, if we do it, we've started to play Arcanum.

Now, under the proposed scenario...

3: Dread Wraiths are high-level foes, so the Fighter's got his gadgeteering going something fierce. He's not just wearing platemail, he's wearing steampunk-type power armor; and has access to spectre-dispersing chemicals or electrical ghost traps or something that's super-effective against Wraiths... so if he happened to prepare any of those, in the same way that the mage might prepare another hard-counter type spell, then the encounter becomes trivial and the party moves on.
2: Starmetal has properties that make it highly effective against the undead, particularly incorporeal undead. So the fighter reaches into his golfbag and pulls out his starmetal sword, and is a dangerous and noteworthy threat to the wraiths, even if he's no more protected from their badness then the mages are.
1: The fighter has some runecraft or alchemy on his weapon that lets him hit incorporeal foes, so he does that. Looks same as above.
0: Finally, you could not do any of that, and just make it so that there aren't any puzzle monsters that are only vulnerable to magic and immune to Cold Iron; assume that sword works on everything.

[Username17]

Some terms have been seriously shat upon by the last couple of decades. Moving forward, I do think that we can't use the word "feat" because too many people think that "feat" means "a minor passive benefit" (interestingly, it does not). So you'd need to use some other term for "abilities that people select". Apparently, Diablo III uses the term "Rune", which makes even less sense than what WotC has reduced the word "Feat" to. But honestly, you could do worse than "Ability" or "Skill".

As for specific classes, I don't think the Fighter is salvageable. Too much baggage of "not getting nice things". And I don't mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Wizards: I mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Rogues. There's lots of shit you can do to be effective in a magical world without literally using any magic, but what the hell can you hope to do without magic if people won't let you be "skillful"?

Stabbing things with a sword is not a protectable role, and if "being skillful in a non-magical way" is a protected role for the rogue, the Fighter is fucked. The Fighter class just needs to go.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Needs anime/wuxia influences for the "not-magic" classes, so they can do cool and powerful stuff as well.

[DrPraetor]

I basically agree with Fuchs. High level fighters are already outrageously tough - being able to survive being hit by a thrown boulder, etc. For that matter, high level fighters are also outrageously bad-ass in other ways, just not outrageously bad-ass enough. I don't like Endovior's suggestion, since it means you have two types of characters at high levels - wizards (who do magic by casting spells) and alchemists (who do magic by collecting strange mystic materials and assembling them). It's an interesting game proposal, but it's not V&V.

The 3rd ed. D&D feats can be divided into several groups -

• Sorta generic feats. Things like Toughness and +2 to two skills. These are lame, numerical fiddles and we want to dispose of them entirely.
• Fighter bonus feats. These we do want to keep, but let's be honest - only fighters (and fighter/rogues and such) ever take them. This is things like Cleave and Spring Attack.
• The various channeling feats. Only clerics are even allowed to take these. Some of them are stupid (extra turning attempts), but some are cool (gain the ability to turn extra types of things.)
• The various metamagic and spellcasting fiddle feats, of which again some (spell focus) are stupid numerical fiddles and some (lord of the uttercold) are pretty cool schticks.

That's three categories of feats, so if we add the various cool stuff Rogues get as a fourth category, we have deleted abilities we don't want, Fighter Abilities, Cleric Abilities, Magic-user Abilities and Thief Abilities.

@Frank - The Fighter being "unskilled" is a 3rd edition innovation, and a bad one. In AD&D 2nd ed., fighters got a fair number of "non-weapon proficiencies" (more than thieves, IIRC - they just didn't matter).
But obviously I'm not hung up on the name. Problem is, any other name you might use - except maybe "Hero"? - has equal or even worse baggage. Warrior is explicitly an inferior Fighter even in D&D 3rd., "Knight" excludes the various scrappy underdog bandit chieftains who really want to be the same character class as princes, and so forth.

I think the core constituency of the original Fighter class - the Prince is one, Robin Hood is one, Maximus from Gladiator is one - was a good mix of guys to get the military-man skill set. The military man skill set should however include both beating people up yourself, and also being a great general and providing various leadership bonuses to the party.

[Username17]

The Fighter being "unskilled" is a 3rd edition innovation, and a bad one.

I agree. But I also think that 12 years later it is too late to divert that course. Just as we can no longer use the word Feat to mean something that isn't shitty, we can no longer use the word Fighter to mean someone who can sneak around, talk convincingly, and open locked doors. People who have James Bond style abilities are forced to be "Rogues", which means that Fighters are shunted into a role where they stab things with swords (either effectively or not) in combat and do absolutely nothing outside of that.

Problem is, any other name you might use - except maybe "Hero"? - has equal or even worse baggage.

Not really. First of all, I support having a class named "Hero". But secondly, if instead you made classes like "Knight", "Berserker", and "Soldier", that would be way better. Can Fighters be good in social situations? Apparently not. But Knights sure can! Berserkers can be good at wilderness lore or seamanship or ancient lore. They have a lot of baggage, but it's not worse baggage, because it isn't baggage that precludes them from handling non-combat scenarios.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Some terms have been seriously shat upon by the last couple of decades. Moving forward, I do think that we can't use the word "feat" because too many people think that "feat" means "a minor passive benefit" (interestingly, it does not). So you'd need to use some other term for "abilities that people select". Apparently, Diablo III uses the term "Rune", which makes even less sense than what WotC has reduced the word "Feat" to. But honestly, you could do worse than "Ability" or "Skill".

As for specific classes, I don't think the Fighter is salvageable. Too much baggage of "not getting nice things". And I don't mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Wizards: I mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Rogues. There's lots of shit you can do to be effective in a magical world without literally using any magic, but what the hell can you hope to do without magic if people won't let you be "skillful"?

Stabbing things with a sword is not a protectable role, and if "being skillful in a non-magical way" is a protected role for the rogue, the Fighter is fucked. The Fighter class just needs to go.

-Username17

Do you think Rogue and Fighter (and Barbarbian, while we're at it) should be combined into a 'Martial Wizard' equivalent?

Basically, Conan is the baseline core class, instead of a bizarre mish mash of multiclassing.

[Endovior]

Some terms have been seriously shat upon by the last couple of decades. Moving forward, I do think that we can't use the word "feat" because too many people think that "feat" means "a minor passive benefit" (interestingly, it does not). So you'd need to use some other term for "abilities that people select". Apparently, Diablo III uses the term "Rune", which makes even less sense than what WotC has reduced the word "Feat" to. But honestly, you could do worse than "Ability" or "Skill".

As for specific classes, I don't think the Fighter is salvageable. Too much baggage of "not getting nice things". And I don't mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Wizards: I mean that they are shat upon too heavily by Rogues. There's lots of shit you can do to be effective in a magical world without literally using any magic, but what the hell can you hope to do without magic if people won't let you be "skillful"?

Stabbing things with a sword is not a protectable role, and if "being skillful in a non-magical way" is a protected role for the rogue, the Fighter is fucked. The Fighter class just needs to go.

-Username17

Do you think Rogue and Fighter (and Barbarbian, while we're at it) should be combined into a 'Martial Wizard' equivalent?

Basically, Conan is the baseline core class, instead of a bizarre mish mash of multiclassing.

That's a reasonable idea. Have a name for the class in question?