The Soldier Problem (Parts 1-3)

[User3]

This is the first of a three-part series. In the last, I will propose what I believe to be an entirely new character development system. But first, I thought I'd explain the thinking that got me there.

I've been thinking for a while about the Fighter class, and I've decided that there's simply no way for the 3.5 fighter to ever be good without radical change in concept. I've become convinced that the actual concept was for the class to be bad. The D20 Modern Strong Hero has similar problems, though not so extreme, and the Star Wars Solider didn't look too great when I perused it. The Point is, I'm tlaking about D20 generally, not just D&D.

Sure, Frank and K have a fighter that works, but it's not really anything like the official fighter. Frank's is a creative problem solver, whose shtick is finding a nonmagic solution to any problem. He's versatile and well-equipped, able to serve as PR or special forces.

The D&D Fighter is the exact opposite. The flavor text right in the firggin PHB frequently seriously offers "thug" as a synonym for fighter, clear evidence that this is an NPC class. I don't even mean it's not powerful enough, simply that it's designed to be *not* heroic.

Other flavor text and countless fighter PrCs make fighters "blade masters' "supreme duelists" and "unbeatable champions" and the like. Classes like Cavalier, Tempest, and the rest have two fatal, fatal flaws.

A: They assume that Fighters should be less flexible than everyone else; masters of a specific rigidly inflexible fighting style and good at fighitng particular kinds of enemies.

Unfortunately, take this too far and you might as well be an NPC. Take "mounted charger" as a concept. This is a character who can kill anything outright in an open field when mounted, but is useless in social situations, dungeon situations, magic situations, or really, situations generally. He's not a hero any more than a locksmith or a sage is a hero-- he's a weapon, a tool, or a plot device. One-trick ponies are by definition not the heroes.

B: They assume that Fighters only ability or function is to excel at personal combat.

This might make sense, except for one problem. EVERY class's role is to excel at personal combat. Every class is a fighter. Some fight with a knife in the back, some fight with fireballs and walls of force, but every PC class is a master of personal combat. Most of the game is personal combat after all. And because of that, they try not to make any class much better than the rest. Thus, you can be rogue, and have fighting plus rogue skills. Or you can be a fighter, and have just fighting.

That's bullshit. Having PCs with no other shtick is ridiculous, and bad for gameplay if you ever want to *do* noncombat. Plus, balancing a trade-off between combat ability and other ability is tough, so ideally everoyne should have an equal balance.

Still, some people want to have a class that's all about combat, and we might as well humor. Let's call it "Soldier" rather than "Fighter" and make him excel at both personal combat and *military* combat.

This means a couple of things.

First, skills. He needs Heal and Knowledge (Religion, History, Arcana) -- field first aid and knowing your enemies.

He needs a special ability to lead troops. More importantly, he needs to be good with military hardware.

What this means varies from game to game. In a Modern game, every character should be good in a wild west shootout, but the Soldier should be the one who knows his way around a sniper rifle. He also can land a plane, drive a tank, lead an artillery squad, and so on.

In D&D, it's trickier. My campaigns tend to get a bit technological; My current D&D game *has* ariships and laser guns, and I just gave Fighters free proficiencies and bonuses with ships and other such goodies.

You may not go that far, but here's something I think we can agree on: Soldiers are experts on war. Magic is integral to war. Therefore, fighters are experts on magic. I'm not saying that we should make them spellcasters. I am saying that when random plot device magic crops up, *fighters* should be the ones who know how to deal with it.

Fighters are the soldiers, Wizards are the techies. Thus, to take a basic example, wands should be the province of fighters, not wizards. Wizards *make* the wands, but it should be the fighter who carries them. After all, a wand is the fantasy equivalent of heavy weapons, and it's always the jock, not the scientist, who carries the big gun.

Of course, there's one other big way that D20 cheats fighter types, but it's complex enough that I'm gonna save it for part two. This is just a summary of where I'm coming from.

[User3]

That was me. Didn't like me to post under my own name.

[TarlSS]

...I actually like that. Alot. Give fighters UMD as a class skill? Access to artificier feats? Many many problems solved

[User3]

In developing fighter concepts that worked, I decided to turn to cinema. Plenty of action movies have fighter-type characters who play a real role in their team. Just today I was watching Firefly for the first time, and noticed that Jayne does a pretty good job pulling his weight as a fighter even in a pretty high-level group.

He’s a good example of my contention that fighters should be soldiers. Everyone in that show is packing heat, but when they need someone to use the sniper rifle, someone to paradrop, or someone with grenades, he’s the one they turn to.

Besides some specific skills training (parachuting) though, he’s got a problem common to fighter concepts. Most of his advantages are either equipment-based or behavioral. This is very, very common in movies and very tough to translate to RPGs.

In a movie, a character’s special power or advantage may be nothing more than the fact that he has a bulletproof jacket and an Uzi while everyone else has nothing but a Glock. In D&D, that doesn’t work, because anyone can buy armor if they decide it’s advantageous.

Similarly, often the biggest edge the seasoned fighter has is keeping cool. He’s the one who’s not afraid to shoot, who acts quickly and decisively, who doesn’t turn and run when things get tough. Some of this is reflected in BAB and HP, but much of it is in how the character is role-played, and D&D assumes that you have full control of your character and that, unless you’re a Barbarian, you’re always cool under fire.

This frequently fails to match up with movie rules. Grenades, for instance, are something that few movie heroes use, and those that do are almost always clearly meant to be fighters, not rogues or wizards. Most movie heroes aren’t comfortable with that kind of firepower.

Yet explosives and heavy weapons, which should be the province of the warrior archetype, frequently fail to be. Grenades in D20 Modern require no weapon proficiency, and since they’re big selling point is easy “to hit’ rolls, you’re actually *more8 likely to see them in the hands of the cowardly doctor than the hardened warrior.

The only way to fix that is to make people pick archetypes and play them. You bring back strict equipment lists by class. You tell the Doctor player he can’t buy a submachine gun because it’s not in-character. You force people to roll morale checks and run away.

That’s not a solution I’m generally comfortable recommending. I’ve seen it tried before, usually to disastrous results. It suffers from two basic problems.

A: It robs players of control. That’s bad, since deciding what to do is what makes the game fun.

B: It reduces drama. Playing a character who’s terrified of guns and won’t touch them is all well and good, but they’re *supposed* to overcome their fear at the last moment to save their best friend’s life. If they have “won’t touch guns” written on their sheet, they can’t do that.

Fortunately, I believe I have developed a solution to those problems, which I will outline in part three.

[User3]

Here’s what we’re going to do. We tear apart the system and build it back up from little tiny pieces. We want this to look like SAME – some numeric skills and a whole bunch of binary abilities. Lots and lots of them, more than in any previous system, most of them set to “off.” We’re trying to fix fighters, so what we’re going to do is invent a bunch of abilities for fighters by taking them away from everyone else.

For instance it’s assumed in D&D that at any time your character feels it’s appropriate he’s ready and willing to charge screaming at an armed opponent and beat him senseless with a club. In reality, there are lots of people who are uncomfortable with that, even ones who might end up on adventures.

So “close to melee” is now a special ability you need to have to deliberately move into melee combat.

Now, you might think this is overly limiting. As you can see, default characters can’t do very much, and playing without even the *option* to melee might sound limiting. Here’s the catch.

Each session, you get some number of experience points. You get them at the start of the session, not the end, and you can save them up as long as you like. They can be spent to buy skills and abilities piecemeal. They can be spent *at any time.*

At any given time, you’re supposed to carry some XP in your pool. Thus, if you really want to run into melee, you can spend 2 XP, write “close to melee’ on your sheet, and do it. From now on, your character can do it without fuss.

Thus, you never have abilities you don’t need, each character’s shtick evolves organically, and you have real costs to going outside your character’s comfort zone.

Eventually, most characters will buy “close to melee.” Some will buy “coup de grace” – others will have to take prisoners. The default character is too afraid of explosives to use grenades, but anyone can overcome that fear at any time.

Classes still exist, they’re just “archetypes’ that determine what you’re allowed to buy. You can only spontaneously develop new psychic powers if your sheet says “mystic” at the top. You can have any number of archetypes approved by your DM.

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

Although this is doable from a computer RPG standpoint, I'm pretty sure it's not viable on a tabletop.

You're talking thousands of schticks.

In a computer game, I can see having the Mystic archetype and getting the Cast Basic Spells and the Whack Monsters with Staff schticks to start and then when I want to charge into melee, the game stops and says You must spend 5 XP for the Charge into Melee schtick--do so? [Y/N] or whatever. But with a tabletop game, such bookkeeping would drive one to madness.

What can a baseline PC do? NPC? Monster? Whatever? Does one check everything a PC attempts ("Sorry, you don't have the Bribe the Guard schtick and you're out of XP, so you're boned") or what?

I know I'm jumping ahead, trying to figure out how this would work instead of why it should be done, but I read this as a GM and, in fear, almost wet myself. This is not a system I could run.

[Draco_Argentum]

Corvus as a fighter makes a lot of sense.

[Judging__Eagle]

1180783310[/unixtime]]Corvus as a fighter makes a lot of sense.

Corvus wasn't a man-sized magical experiment on making animals into humanoids gone wrong was he?

B/c that's what my last character named corvus was.

A wand-using anthropomorphic (and hating it) raven.

Corax would have been a better name though.

[Draco_Argentum]

I was talking about the elf from Heretic. He runs around blasting crap with wands. No actual spells until the sequel.

[User3]

Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at one in the morning.

I do recognize that it could get pretty tricky. The key is in setting up the system to amkethsi as easy as possible.

The first thing to remember is that we want to write abilities rather than restrictions, since that's clearer and easier. Each character should have a box on the character sheet that lists currently available actions.

The second thing to do is try as hard as we can to keep the number of abilities down. Yes, we need to have a whole bunch, since we're turning thigns that D&D characters take for granted into abilities, and since it's a modular system. But whenever we can prune, we will. The hardest part of the whole thing might well be the basic combat system -- how to create a handful of abilities that differentiate a warrior from a noncombatant without creating too many tiny rules and loopholes.

Third, we have a list of basic abilities that aren't tied to any archetype, and we print them all right on the character sheet. That way, the XP cost is right there, the table is right there, all you need to do is put a checkmark next to it and go. If we want characters to grow vertically, we assign an overall character level and make abilities scale by that, so you can quickly calculate your bonus on any new skill or ability. If we only care about horizontal growth, than abilities just don't scale at all.

"Bribe the Guard" probably isn't it's own ability; it's a function of the diplomacy skill. Just like in D&D, we break down combat at much higher resolution than noncombat.

[RandomCasualty]

It doesn't really fix anything. At least not the "doctor with grenades" problem you were trying to fix.

Basically it just leads to one trick pony ism where people spend XP only on one thing and that becomes their pure combat schtick. So the doctor just takes grenade affinity or whatever you want to call it.

The idea isn't to prevent people from taking actions, but rather to make them ineffective or inefficient. The doctor with grenades could easily just be like a penalty that blows you up if you happen to be unproficient with the weapon. Maybe he drops it at his feet or something on a natural 1-2 or something.

[User3]

I'm not sure why you feel confident saying it will lead to one trick ponies.

I mean, it might well. That is a definite risk. In fact, it's an issue with basically all systems. D&D has one trick ponies. Even D&D ala Frank and K. And point-buy system is going to be even more vulnerable to hyperspecialization.

That said, there are plenty of ways ot fight it. Have a rule about buying too many high level abilities before getting a certain number of low-level ones. Build a combat system that allows for synergies between tactics. Design adventures that reward versatility.

This is meant to be cinematic, and most TV / Movie characters really *do* have a signature fighting style they use 9 times out of 10. At least under this system nobody gets *locked in* to one-trick status, unlike dedicated D&D builds.

As for the "doctor with grenades" problem, this particular post isn't really about that. It's about a cinematic, modular character building ruleset.

The broader point fo the grenade anecdote is that designers assume using grenades should be something msot characters can easily do, because they don't consider psychological training for warfare an important part of their system. I want to. To embody psychology in mechanics is tough, because psychology is fluid, and therefore the mechanics must be similarly fluid.

But actually solving the "doctors with grenades" problem is easy. It just requires making grenades harder to use or less effective.

[Crissa]

If your XP is symbolized by chips, and then spent like upping the ante in Poker... Does ante slow down poker much? Does anyone ever play with limited time to decide things?

-Crissa

PS: fbmf, can you tack these threads into one, please?

[fbmf]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Certainly. I'm unclear as to why that wasn't done in the first place.
[/TGFBS]

[User3]

Well, I had overestimated the level of interest the thread would generate, and figured that it might be best to separate discussion of extemporaneous character building from discussion of the role of fightrs, or fighters in cinema. I agree that the merge is for the best.

[Brobdingnagian]

Hmm...

Class-based, level-based, free progression, and static increase system?

Class: Determines the cost of the abilities you can buy; some classes get things cheaper, others get things at higher rates. For instance, it's cheaper for a Fighter to close to melee than a Wizard.

Level: An experience total seperate from the experience (ability points?) required to buy new abilities. Determines the overall strength of a character and what level of abilities a character can buy, so as to allow a GM to properly gauge encounters. For example, the 'Basic Melee Combat' tree. First level ability: Close to Melee. Second level ability: Extra attack in Melee. This would change the way BAB works, but that's something different entirely.

Free Progression: Think WoD character sheets, except not so absolute. Every ability tree has a certain level (1-5 sounds good) that you buy a dot in with experience. Each level of an ability would only be accessible if you met the experience level requirement (LV 1 abilities = levels 1-4, LV 2 abilities = levels 5-8, LV 3 = 9-12, etc.)

Static Increase: The biggest problem that D&D and most D20 systems have is that a character's power level escalates at a very strange rate. The one thing the Final Fantasy series did right is that character power escalated at an entirely static rate; a level two character is twice as strong as a level one character, and a level three character is one-and-a-half times as strong as a level two character. A level eight character should not be able to defeat any number of first level characters; they should lose against eight, due to extra actions on the part of the first level characters. Yes, this means a lot more levels. It also means a game that doesn't end just when it's getting interesting.

Of course, we'd be pretty much making a new game at this point. These are just some ideas.

[User3]

We'd need to make a new game anyway for this to work.

Re: Brobdingnagian.

"Class" -- That's how I originally planned it, but I'm beginning to wonder whether it's a good idea. Different-priced abilities have the same design problems as cross-classed skills. It might be better to have simply "accessible" and "inaccessable"

Level: I've been debating whether I want levels at all; the upside is that if abilities scale by level, getting more dots in them can be less important, freeing people to generalize. But it's an extra mechanic that we may not actually need. In the end, I think it depends on whether the genre you're emulating wants vertical character growth, or only horizontal growth.

Free Progression: This is more or less what I was thinking.

Static Increase: This is a good idea, though I'm not sure why you bring FF into this. I'm not sure what version you're referring to, but in my experience power in FF is almost completely divorced from level.

[rapanui]

Add a new stat: Guts or Courage.

Characters get 10 guts points per level or something like that.

Doing something outside of your class archetype takes guts. So for Mr. Fighter to throw a grenade, or charge a fully-armored orc with his bare fists: it's no problem. For a techie or mage to do the same thing would take a a few Guts points (maybe 3 for the former, 10 for the latter, etc).

Instead, for Mr. Fighter to jump into the swirling Vortex of teleportation, it's going to take some guts, while Mr. Mage is going to be all like, "No problem yo."

The problem here is that you're going to run into edge cases (the techie wants to use the grenade to blow up a door in a controlled fashion... does it take Guts?) and you're going to have to have guts cost for every class for every possible gutsy action. I don't even imagine what a nightmare that matrix would look like.

At any rate, there are deeper fundamental philosophical problems at the heart of any RPG [roleplaying game => oxymoron] that prevent the current (standard d20) fighter concept from shining. It shouldn't exist and I prefer F&K's solution.

[Crissa]

That's a great idea, Rapa.

It could be represented by saves, too.

-Crissa

[Brobdingnagian]

Final Fantasy 5 for the SNES. Good game.

[User3]

I'm wondering whether the correlation between XP and GP should be one-way or two way.

That is, clearly XP should be able ot spent on class features like "cybereyes" or "keeps a stolen diamond in his pants" or "inherited lasergun prototype"

The question is, what happens if the PCs encounter, say a big bag of money? Do they get to keep it?

I'm inclined to require them to spend XP if they want to actually receive any money. Otherwise they donate it to charity, spend it on booze, or are forced to turn it over to the cops. Thoughts?

[ckafrica]

Well why is there a big bag of money waiting for them to take it if you didn't mean to give them the option to take it. You can't railroad characters by giving them something and then requiring them to spend xp to keep it. You CAN railroad them by making it nearly essential that they spend it on other things besides picking up more gear but than it is not a reward but a plot device not a reward.

EX: Your guys wipe out some drug dealers and find 10K. Now is this a reward for the job or not. If it isn't than you roll it into the plot. Now the mob boss wants the money and when he tracks down the PCs he gives them 2 options die or give him double by the end of the week. SO now the players need to take the money to Vegas and double it; then any they make on top of that is the prize. Wiping out 2 low level thugs isn't worthy of the 10k but stepping up against some of the top card sharks in the world is worth a 5k bonus at the end. let the wackiness commence

[Draco_Argentum]

Except that threatening PCs with death means encounters get thrown at them. So pissing off a mob boss is just like writing hunted by ninjas on your character sheet.

[Crissa]

Stealing money means it belonged to someone else who probably wants it back. If it was an organized crime, they'll use nonlawful means of returning it. If it was a private citizen, they have lawful options as well, If it was a bank or government, they have troops and serial numbers to track you down with.

If they were gold coins in Rome, someone might ask where you got them from - if you weren't the proper class to be spending it, you might find troops on your doorstep asking for the money back - and they wouldn't mind taking your eyes as replacement.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1181122331[/unixtime]]Except that threatening PCs with death means encounters get thrown at them. So pissing off a mob boss is just like writing hunted by ninjas on your character sheet.

Yeah, there's really no reason why the PCs are going to care. I mean in a combat based game, getting hunted by something isn't even a big deal.