How do we get rid of the Fighter

[Kaelik]

The next step is that no future discussion are derailed by lunatic assholes like nocker and Midnight whining about how the fighter must stay, he must not have any power source besides having two hands, and he must be called specifically "Fighter", or alternatively, "The Fighter Who Fights With His Fighting Fight."

Then once those fuckers stop derailing every conversation that even tangentially relates to fighters with their ridiculous bullshit all the other threads can actually be about their actual titles.

So for example, a thread that was started under the explicit assumption that fighters are bad for the game could talk about ways to fix 3e by removing fighters, instead of having the same two assholes show up and declare that the only problem with 3e is that Fighters are not mandatory, and that the very idea of removing fighters will destroy the game.

[zugschef]

[...] and that the very idea of removing fighters will destroy the game.

because pathfinder!

[Aryxbez]

Drolyt's last post reminds us of a good question I'd like to see answered as well. As it's an example of a subject that will actually CONTINUE the discussion.

However, Mistborn is unwilling to answer own claims has made many pages back, and still await said responses from (and other applicable posters as well).

[Almaz]

The idea that the Idiot Halberdier has to be in the game because a significant portion of the fanbase wants them is nonsense, anyways. Any lasting group I've been in has not had people who wanted, seriously, to eschew magic in the sense that we use to talk about magic in D&D. That is, they might hate wizards, or spells, or whatever, but they won't refuse supernatural power outright. They might go into a setting that has steampunk bullshit and say "I won't use magic, I will only use clockwork engines of death" but that is, insofar as real discussions occur, almost always some kind of variant "magic system." The people who want their magic to come from psi crystals or steampunk crossbows will go and play those games. And generally, people are fine with gaining their powers inherently - when presented with the option, I see lots of people spec their combat dudes into anime zwee fighting, or picking up the ability to make lightning spears.

What you can't do is make it so you can't play a Joe Everyman with Sword dude. No one will look at a fantasy RPG, find that inaccessible, and want to continue playing. The specifics of it do not matter. Often, they're actually quite fine with using magic, and want to be a Rand al'Thor who is the Invincible Blazing Swordman next to the rest of the party playing Luckman and Wolfman. They want to feel badass while also feeling like themselves, and they want some kind of aniconic power token in the form of the cross-hilted sword they can masturbate over. I mean unsheathe and kick ass using. So, there has to be a player option that feels "plain" and "straightforward," someone who the Generic White Dude can identify with on some level, even if it is not actually plain and actually quite mystically empowered or divinely strong or whatever.

Ideally, we force-feed that archetype the ability to play at high level, even as they continue that circuit, so no one has to feel weird. We also want to keep its play difficulty relatively low.

I realize that my anecdotal experience of D&D and fantasy RPG groups does not constitute data no matter how much I have of it, but I really haven't found many of the"oh my gawd, magic is bad always" people in my gaming experience. When I rarely found an individual who held that belief, they were singularly undesirable to play alongside because they kept going on about shit, so I'm pretty okay with booting them to whatever dark corner of the world they crawled out of. Which is what basically happened. Usually, they wound up excusing themselves because they were intolerant pissants anyways.

[zugschef]

Enough people love the fighter for whatever reason that they have, that its not going any fucking where.
You're best bet is to fix it.

that is the point: you can't fix stupid.

all this crap about how people would be offended if you took away their holy cow (i.e. the fighter), makes me laugh. most gaming tables realize pretty quickly how borked it is to not have any outside of combat relevance.

as a designer you partly control your target audience. if you don't give them a fighter the whole "fighters can't have nice things"-argument instantly dies. apart from the grognards who want to win against the odds all the time in a game with a rng, people will gladly accept it because it makes the game objectively better.

[Mistborn]

What you can't do is make it so you can't play a Joe Everyman with Sword dude. No one will look at a fantasy RPG, find that inaccessible, and want to continue playing. The specifics of it do not matter. Often, they're actually quite fine with using magic, and want to be a Rand al'Thor who is the Invincible Blazing Swordman next to the rest of the party playing Luckman and Wolfman. They want to feel badass while also feeling like themselves, and they want some kind of aniconic power token in the form of the cross-hilted sword they can masturbate over. I mean unsheathe and kick ass using. So, there has to be a player option that feels "plain" and "straightforward," someone who the Generic White Dude can identify with on some level, even if it is not actually plain and actually quite mystically empowered or divinely strong or whatever.

It doesn't matter, you're going to have to deny people their fervent wishes because what they want is impossible.

[nockermensch]

The next step is that no future discussion are derailed by lunatic assholes like nocker and Midnight whining about how the fighter must stay, he must not have any power source besides having two hands, and he must be called specifically "Fighter", or alternatively, "The Fighter Who Fights With His Fighting Fight."

Then once those fuckers stop derailing every conversation that even tangentially relates to fighters with their ridiculous bullshit all the other threads can actually be about their actual titles.

So for example, a thread that was started under the explicit assumption that fighters are bad for the game could talk about ways to fix 3e by removing fighters, instead of having the same two assholes show up and declare that the only problem with 3e is that Fighters are not mandatory, and that the very idea of removing fighters will destroy the game.

Fixing 3e by Removing the Fighter
a detailed step-by-step guide, by Nockermensch

1. Remove the goddamn Fighter.
2. Refer to [1.]

Trust me, there's no D&D patrol. I did a game removing the wizard and the cleric once (spellcasters were druids and psions, everybody walked around with tattoos of Regenerate <x> Wounds and Vigor, people were fucking afraid of undeads) and it was awesome. Nobody came kicking down my door for it and people still generally refer to that as "that d&d campaign without wizards and clerics." The game didn't cease to be D&D.

[Almaz]

It doesn't matter, you're going to have to deny people their fervent wishes because what they want is impossible.

Not... really. "Plain" does not constitute "a miserable pile of unplayable garbage" in this case, it just constitutes "tactics that are generally straightforward." As most game systems are not overly complicated, and there will be more or less straightforward solutions to every problem, it is not really hard to do this. Frank even described "always has a static set of powers which can always be used" as a possible power source for a Hero class in some fantasy game, if I remember. So uh. Yeah. You can do it.

[nockermensch]

Enough people love the fighter for whatever reason that they have, that its not going any fucking where.
You're best bet is to fix it.

that is the point: you can't fix stupid.

all this crap about how people would be offended if you took away their holy cow (i.e. the fighter), makes me laugh. most gaming tables realize pretty quickly how borked it is to not have any outside of combat relevance.

as a designer you partly control your target audience. if you don't give them a fighter the whole "fighters can't have nice things"-argument instantly dies. apart from the grognards who want to win against the odds all the time in a game with a rng, people will gladly accept it because it makes the game objectively better.

I think you'll love my guide and give it raving reviews, then.

[Mistborn]

Not... really. "Plain" does not constitute "a miserable pile of unplayable garbage" in this case, it just constitutes "tactics that are generally straightforward."

Yes it is, people's definition of "plain" in this case is mundane sword guy, and mundane sword guys will never not be a miserable pile of unplayable garbage.

[Almaz]

Not... really. "Plain" does not constitute "a miserable pile of unplayable garbage" in this case, it just constitutes "tactics that are generally straightforward."

Yes it is, people's definition of "plain" in this case is mundane sword guy, and mundane sword guys will never not be a miserable pile of unplayable garbage.

Erm. You ... aren't technically disagreeing with me?

As I just noted, anyone who really ideologically clings to that ideal constitutes a valid selection for dropping from the RPG community entire, or at least exile from fantasy RPGs, because they are inherently incapable of accepting that they are playing in a fantasy land of some kind. In a real sense they are too immature for children's make-believe stories. That, or they are still off playing OD&D so we shouldn't be factoring their opinions anyways.

As zugschef noted, you can control your playerbase by designing an RPG that does not cater to failure states, and all I was asserting was that there is not going to actually be a great hue and cry if fighters develop magical abilities of some kind, because the itty bitty number of gamers who are really that obsessed over it are KOS for gaming groups that do things like read the setting text. Those who read it and internalize that there are not really muggle fighters will either put it down and walk away (and we want them to walk away) or will play the game as-is (and I predict they will be the majority of actual gamers).

Edit: Wow, I need more coffee, I keep making spelling errors.

[nockermensch]

It doesn't matter, you're going to have to deny people their fervent wishes because what they want is impossible.

NEWSFLASH: Companies get rich selling the impossible. Movie at 11.

See that ranking? The question you still didn't answer is based on stuff like that. Ignore my personal opinions for the moment and deal with reality for a change. That link is the world as it exists right now. How do you change that to a beautiful world where everybody plays competent classes that don't depend on MTP or DM pity to survive?

Refer to my guide if needed.

[Mistborn]

NEWSFLASH: Companies get rich selling the impossible. Movie at 11.

See that ranking? The question you still didn't answer is based on stuff like that. Ignore my personal opinions for the moment and deal with reality for a change. That link is the world as it exists right now. How do you change that to a beautiful world where everybody plays competent classes that don't depend on MTP or DM pity to survive?

Refer to my guide if needed.

The next step is that no future discussion are derailed by lunatic assholes like nocker and Midnight whining about how the fighter must stay, he must not have any power source besides having two hands, and he must be called specifically "Fighter", or alternatively, "The Fighter Who Fights With His Fighting Fight."

[nockermensch]

Oh, I see. You don't want to fix things, at all. You want a hugbox.

EDIT: To avoid making posts too short, lets elaborate a bit:

Right, keep up with the exercise. Assume that hugbox is got. Nobody enters and derails your threads anymore. What's next?

[Almaz]

So for example, a thread that was started under the explicit assumption that fighters are bad for the game could talk about ways to fix 3e by removing fighters, instead of having the same two assholes show up and declare that the only problem with 3e is that Fighters are not mandatory, and that the very idea of removing fighters will destroy the game.

Anyways, 3e is a terrible game and a game that we should not bother to try "saving." This doesn't mean that we can't write material for it if we want (goodness knows I have), but we shouldn't waste our breath talking about how to "fix" 3e D&D. The game was dead on arrival. The only reason for us to write stuff for it is, straight up, if we want to run a 3e game with new stuff in it, but that will not actually fix the game. The rice has been burnt to a crisp and no amount of soy sauce will bring it back.

Book of Nine Swords was an attempt to fix 3e D&D, and was rejected, but the conclusion that people have drawn from ToB is that "weeaboo fightan magic" is not actually desirable, whereas in reality, the only issue are people who are attached to preconceived notions of "what is D&D." You have to distance yourself from their branding. Of course people hate change, but new things are not necessarily changed. They are simply different.

So, assuming you want to create a game that "feels like" 3e in some indecipherable way (not hard, we just use some of the same ingredients) then what we do is look at the extant material. Ideally, the things we want to use most are things that already existed in the game, either in fully or proto-realized forms. So let's look at combat wombats in 3e.

We've got:
Heavy Melee: Barbarians and paladins.
Light Melee/Range: Rogues and rangers.
Reality: Clerics and Druids.
Unusable Bullshit: Monks

And in the expansion books we see recurring themes of

Spellswords
Cavaliers
Holy Cavaliers
Almost Usable Monks
"Bear Warriors" and other combat shifters (Druids)
Ninja! and other Orientalist bullshit
MIND WARRIORS!
A billion and one ways to splash more magic on things.
"You turn into a giant juggernaut" prestige classes.
More versions of Angry Dude
Random boring specialized weapon classes
Various Tinkerers

Of these, the ones with the longest shelf life as actual playable concepts are spellswords and holy knights. The cleric proves that by being the latter. BEAR WARRIORS! are also quite playable for the same reason druid is. The main thing we're missing is the "sword with personal magic" dude as a main-line player choice, so that we can have people flip out and fly and stab people. "Rogues" are also playable for quite a while in 3e, and people don't really seem to notice if your rogue gains the ability to zap herself across the room and stab people, as long as it is high level. To make increased continuity happen, however, it might be best if "rogues" gained devices a la a Batman/Iron Man type of character, giving them the ability to create as well as remove traps, and stayed relevant in high levels by doing that increasingly.

[Kaelik]

No Almaz, the best most complete most fun fantasy [clarification of type of fantasy] RPG to yet be written was not dead on arrival.

And I do not want my game to feel similar by having bear warriors who do 1d8 damage + effect.

If I am making a game from scratch, I will talk about making a game from scratch. But making a game from scratch if way the fuck more work that making minor tweaks to 3e that make it a better, but not perfect game.

The bottom line is, I have not written 8 monster manuals. I have not written one monster manual. Writing a Monster Manual is hard work. I am not payed for that work.

I am not designing a new game because that game will not have a Monster Manual and will therefore be drasitcally less playable than modified 3e.

[Almaz]

No Almaz, the best most complete most fun fantasy [clarification of type of fantasy] RPG to yet be written was not dead on arrival.

It's nice that you think that.

I'm not saying that it wasn't good, and I have no malice towards it, if perhaps plenty of frustration. But we have to admit, the damage was dealt while it was still in design. The decisions to fuck up the game system and setting were made at a core point in development, and undoing them is... not possible. Whenever I write D&D material, I keep that in mind... I will not even make a "whole" game of 3e. I cannot fix it. No one could, and the damage is a lot of interconnected issues.

At the point you reach "has written enough to fix the game" you will have invested enough effort, in my assessment, to have simply written another game.

And I do not want my game to feel similar by having bear warriors who do 1d8 damage + effect.

Eh, I was just noting people like "super mode with vague animal themes" as a concept. A lot more people do lycanthropes and shit like that.

If I am making a game from scratch, I will talk about making a game from scratch. But making a game from scratch if way the fuck more work that making minor tweaks to 3e that make it a better, but not perfect game.

The bottom line is, I have not written 8 monster manuals. I have not written one monster manual. Writing a Monster Manual is hard work. I am not payed for that work.

I don't agree with your premises (i.e. how hard it is to write that much, versus a patch), but I cannot fault your logic otherwise. If I thought the word count would be the same that you do, I would agree. As it is, I don't. I am sure we both can cite examples in our support on this topic, but since I have no need or interest to persuade you otherwise, at least, not more than I already have attempted, I will simply adjourn. I wish you luck.

[Username17]

The idea that we can't make things better by ranting on the internet is actually proven to be false. We can, and we have. It's slow progress, but it totally happens.

When Pathfinder and 4e came out, one of the things they promised to do was to fix the problem where Wizards were much more powerful than Fighters. Now, they didn't do that in a way that was good, and in Pathfinder's case they didn't deliver on that at all. But the point is that they said that was a thing they were going to do. And you know why they said that? Because it was nearly universally acknowledged to be a problem.

And it was acknowledged to be a problem, not because the designers got any smarter, but because people ranted on the internet. It changed the culture. My "Cleric Archer" proof of concept gained traction in 2001, but that didn't stop Ed Stark from announcing with great fanfare in 2003 that he was powering up the Druid for 3.5 (because it was a "tweener class" apparently). It wasn't for a year or two after that that the forces of "Fighters are Awesome" got thoroughly routed and the "CoDzilla" meme took its place.

Yes, the main RPGs are the main RPGs because of name recognition. And they hire people based on nepotism rather than talent. The people who are writing D&D 5e got their positions based on being in Monte Cook's Call of Cthulhu campaign in 1996. But they will be gone eventually. Even Mike Mearls must eventually get fired or finally get promoted to a position he can't do any harm in by designing things. And the people who replace them will not believe that they need to increase the power of the Druid because it is a "tweener class", they will believe that Fighters are weaker than Wizards, and they will attempt (at whatever their competence level) to do something about it.

And we will have gotten to this happy state because we, and people like us, ranted on the internet.

---

Now sometimes companies will do outreach, and they will grab fans and they will use those fans for cheap labor. And in the modern era, they will grab these fans off the internet (in the eighties, they went down to the local university gaming club and grabbed people in person). Both Ancient History and myself were picked up by FanPro when it still existed to write things for Shadowrun. And Shadowrun was better for it. But very importantly, putting ideas into the message board argument space really does change what those elevated fans believe, what they write, and how they influence the game. Even if we assume that the nepotistic lords of failure running the show at the moment (such as Mike for D&D and Jason for Shadowrun) are totally ignoring the received wisdom of the internets, the future versions of Frank Trollman and AncientHistory are definitely definitely not.

And sometimes people on the internets will decide to make their own heartbreakers. And some of these will get completed, and most of them won't. But the heartbreakers that are made will be influenced by what is said and what is argued for. For example: as of this moment, there's discussion of a M:tG style RPG and discussion of an Exalted style RPG near the top of this page. In neither case is "dumbass warrior with no magic and no power source" even discussed as a possible character archetype.

Bottom line: the first step to getting the worthless Fighter out is to change hearts and minds. And that's mostly done. Threads like this not only can turn back the tide of bullshit Fighters, their inevitable victory on that point is already assured. No one making a new edition of D&D or Pathfinder is going to get to the printing stage without at least making a show of attempting to solve the Fighters Suck Problem. And with enough memetic push, we could plausibly make it so that the next editions couldn't be made even having a class as bullshit in concept as a "Fighter". And that would be swell.

-Username17

[Drolyt]

If you want to fix D&D 3.5 getting rid of the fighter won't help you that much. Or at all really. Yeah fighter is a bad name for a class, but paladin is a great name for a class and the paladin sucks as much as the fighter.

I think the first thing you would need to work on is the skills system, since this is typically the only access to non combat abilities nonspellcasters get. Some ideas I've had include having "rituals" or "incantations" that can be used by anyone with the spellcraft skill (maybe some other skills as well, or the spellcraft skill could be split up so that you have a "divination" skill and an "enchantment" skill etc.) and creating suitably awesome uses for mundane skills, for example why doesn't jump let you make a jump attack against a flying dragon (or at least jump high enough that you can land on the dragon's back)?

The second thing is the magic item system. The way 3e works melee characters rely on fiddly bonuses from items to combat level appropriate challenges while spellcasters are mostly fine without any items. So item bonuses need to be rolled into the classes themselves and magic items should instead focus on doing cool things that make the game more fun. It sucks that awesome stuff like flying carpets, crystal balls, rods of lordly might, marvelous pigments, etc. get passed over because players are focused on getting another +1 to their kill things stat.

Compared to those two problems (and a host of others) the fact that "fighter" is a rather meaningless term just isn't that important.

Edit: To be clear, if you are starting from scratch a good place to start is to look at your class concepts and ensure they don't suck, but that will won't help if the rest of your system is shit.

[Kaelik]

I'm not saying that it wasn't good,

Yes, that is exactly what you said. You said that 3e was a terrible game. Terrible is the opposite of good. You said it was a terrible game and you are wrong.

At the point you reach "has written enough to fix the game" you will have invested enough effort, in my assessment, to have simply written another game.

Once again, because you are too stupid to read. I am not going to make a perfect game. 3e as is is fun to play. Minor improvements make the game slightly better. Yes, it cannot and will not be perfect ever without completely destroying the game from the ground up. And when Frank finishes KSF, the first thing I will do is look at the Monster Manual, and maybe that will be the perfect game. And certainly arguments like this one can also benefit KSF or other heartbreakers too, and it would be great if every discussion of KSF didn't have Midnight and Nocker whining about how the game must have a fighter who fights with his fighting and is called the fighter.

But minor improvements to 3e are on their own worth doing if you aren't going to write your own heartbreaker because 3e is a good game and making minor improvements and then playing that minorly improved but not OMGWTFBBQPERFECT game is easier than writing your own game from scratch.

I don't agree with your premises (i.e. how hard it is to write that much, versus a patch),

No the problem is you don't understand what the goal is. The goal is not the best game that could possibly exist, the goal is the best game that I can actually play.

The only way that I can get a game better than 3e with minor improvements is for someone else to write it, because I cannot write a Monster Manual.

If you want to fix D&D 3.5 getting rid of the fighter won't help you that much. Or at all really. Yeah fighter is a bad name for a class, but paladin is a great name for a class and the paladin sucks as much as the fighter.

The point is not to fix 3e. The point is that we can literally do nothing until the Midnights and nockers of the world go die in a ditch.

You want to fix 3e? You can't, because Midnight will whine that there has to be a Fighter Who Fights With His Fighting Fight class and that class has to be balanced against the monsters, so the first thing is to rewrite the Monster Manual to accomodate the fighter. Bam, thread destroyed.

You want to make a heartbreaker? You can't, because Midnight will tell you that unless your heartbreaker presents as a valid concept a character with no power source who acts like a commoner outside of combat your game is shit and is ruining the universe. Bam, another thread destroyed.

[Mistborn]

What is KSF?

[Drolyt]

What is KSF?

I think it is referring to the Kitchen Sink Fantasy, but I didn't realize Frank was still working on that.

[TarkisFlux]

Compared to those two problems (and a host of others) the fact that "fighter" is a rather meaningless term just isn't that important.

Edit: To be clear, if you are starting from scratch a good place to start is to look at your class concepts and ensure they don't suck, but that will won't help if the rest of your system is shit.

Fixing subsystem vs. subsystem problems just highlights disparities in access to that subsystem over the problems between the subsystems. If the concept is to just stab dudes with a sword in combat, no amount of subsystem tweaks will work because the concept doesn't have access to them by definition. Suck concepts will suck, and have to be fixed at the root. On top of all the rest of the fiddly system bits.

[sabs]

The Paladin didn't have to be a bad class. There's no reason you couldn't make Paladin CoDZilla, and make Clerics more spellcastery.

The Concept of "Holy Warrior who powers up to face what he's fighting through the power of his God." That's got traction all the way up to, "And now we're fighting Old Ones." Just because D&D implementated like a retarded 3 year old Goat. Doesn't mean the Class concept is bad.

The problem with Fighter is that it's not just the implementation that sucks. It's the actual concept. It doesn't scale to "And now we're fighting Fire Elementals." Much less, Old Ones.

D&D is a kitchen sink fantasy game. It's inspired by Lord of the Rings, but lets be honest. Gandalf does less magic than a level 4 Wizard. Most of Gandalf's power is in "I have studied a lot, and i know shit, oh.. and I have a good knack for putting together the right people for an adventuring party." He's more of a Shadowrun style Fixer, than a D&D Wizard.

The fact of the matter is, that D&D is a world where a non trivial number of people have the ability to cast 5-10 wishes/miracles a day. Everyday of their lives. And that's not including the ones who can summon things that can do wishes. It's a world where a Wizard can teleport without error to any planet in the prime material plane, and anywhere on it.

But even if you drop down to level 6 spells. Wizards and Clerics can do incredibly bad ass things. Bards, Inquisitors, Magus can do fairly impressive things too with magic. In that world, the guy whose only stick is I swing a sword, does not belong.

[nockermensch]

The point is not to fix 3e. The point is that we can literally do nothing until the Midnights and nockers of the world go die in a ditch.

You want to fix 3e? You can't, because Midnight will whine that there has to be a Fighter Who Fights With His Fighting Fight class and that class has to be balanced against the monsters, so the first thing is to rewrite the Monster Manual to accomodate the fighter. Bam, thread destroyed.

You want to make a heartbreaker? You can't, because Midnight will tell you that unless your heartbreaker presents as a valid concept a character with no power source who acts like a commoner outside of combat your game is shit and is ruining the universe. Bam, another thread destroyed.

I feel bad now for having directed the hugbox barb at Misty when I just learned that the only thing impeding kaelik to make the world better right now is how he gets all butt ranged and hurt feelings when people disagree with him on the internet.