The Mundane Melee fighter can go fuck himself.

[sabs]

Hawkeye and Green Arrow both suffer from, we just don't rate.
Green Arrow works okay in a World where Batman is the top dog. And really he's the bow and arrow version of Batman. But you now DC Billionaires get bored easily so they turn themselves into mid-level Vigilantes.

But when JLA or Avengers has an adventure together. Hawkeye, GA, and even Batman all wear the "I'm only here for moral support" shirt.


If hawkeye and Green Arrow had "super soldier" on their list of special powers. Then at least they could hang with Captain America. They still wouldn't rate to hang with Ironman, Hulk, thor, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern. But you know.. they could hang with the B squad.

[ishy]

1.) In 3E and 4E D&D, melee combat has gotten much, much more expansion material than ranged combat. Seriously, I think that for every 4 melee combat feats you'll get one ranged combat feat. With this sort of artificial subsidy I wouldn't be surprised that people find melee combat more interesting. In the same way people find wizards more interesting than psions.

2.) I think that it's rather lame and sad that people find archers boring. Because ranged combat has tactical variety that melee combat doesn't. Stuff like firing from illusions, baiting people into trapped squares, shuffling zones of control (even with simple shit like smokesticks attached to an arrow), and just sniping from treetops.

Yeah I guess if in for example a pathfinder game, you wouldn't have to take: Point Blank Shot, precise shot, manyshot, rapid shot, deadly aim, before you can actually play an archer, you could write more interesting feats for archers.

You might want to write something like combat manoeuvres for archers too.

And well, most DMs I know, would let you auto-disbelieve illusions when things are flying through them (need proper illusion rules).
Sniping from treetops is just you being stuck in one location, with possible LoS issues.

[TheFlatline]

1.) In 3E and 4E D&D, melee combat has gotten much, much more expansion material than ranged combat. Seriously, I think that for every 4 melee combat feats you'll get one ranged combat feat. With this sort of artificial subsidy I wouldn't be surprised that people find melee combat more interesting. In the same way people find wizards more interesting than psions.

2.) I think that it's rather lame and sad that people find archers boring. Because ranged combat has tactical variety that melee combat doesn't. Stuff like firing from illusions, baiting people into trapped squares, shuffling zones of control (even with simple shit like smokesticks attached to an arrow), and just sniping from treetops.

Yeah I guess if in for example a pathfinder game, you wouldn't have to take: Point Blank Shot, precise shot, manyshot, rapid shot, deadly aim, before you can actually play an archer, you could write more interesting feats for archers.

You might want to write something like combat manoeuvres for archers too.

And well, most DMs I know, would let you auto-disbelieve illusions when things are flying through them (need proper illusion rules).
Sniping from treetops is just you being stuck in one location, with possible LoS issues.

Most of the feats for a martial class would probably be better off served as class abilities that you pick, like the rogue's tricks that he gets, and then yes you could design more interesting feats.

[vagrant]

What the actual fuck? This is, in my limited time posting and lurking for the past not-quite-year or so, the fourth or fifth 'DMFs need to die' thread I've seen.

Fuck, when I first started lurking I even agreed with the viewpoint. Now, honestly, I'm fucking sick of it. Maybe half of it is fucking contrariness, but basically, I disagree.

People are going to want to play 'Dude who stabs shit until its dead.' People are going to want to play 'Dude who stabs goblins until they're dead' and they're going to want to play that same dude, but replace 'goblin' with 'dragon.' And honestly, outside of grognards and the Den, I have found fuck all people who think that 'Dude who stabs shit until its dead' needs to be the same concept as 'Dude who stabs shit in a totally realistic manner and has no superpowers whatsoever but he can totally still kill imaginary monsters.'

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

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

Narrow your hate. Do you hate when grognards push for real world mundanity in their DnD fighters? (That's honestly such a small problem when there are so many other, more important problems to hate that I worry about your mental state if you do) or do you hate melee combat? Are you filled with seething, unquenchable bloodlust whenever someone says 'So I draw my sword...' instead of 'I cast...'?

Mundane and melee are two separate, unrelated issues. Stop conflating them. You fucking fuck.

[Lago PARANOIA]

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

Have you been paying even a little attention to 3E, Pathfinder, or 4E D&D?

No, people won't say it out loud. Hell, a lot of them will even deny it. But it's internalized all the same.

Just fucking look at peoples' fighter fixes or the actual class progression for fighters or the Martial power source. I sure don't see much of a difference between hypothetical content creators who would openly and honestly make 'realism' as a limitation on these classes and what we actually get.

[Cyberzombie]

But when JLA or Avengers has an adventure together. Hawkeye, GA, and even Batman all wear the "I'm only here for moral support" shirt.

Batman more or less holds his own as far as contributions. Sure he can't bench press an oil tanker, but he always seems to contribute, usually through the use of gadgets.

It's important to note that Batman holds the wizard role in Justice League. Most of the JL has a small power set with effectively huge numbers, while Batman, through the use of technology, can do potentially anything, but is fragile. In D&D terms, that's describing a wizard.

[vagrant]

Internalised? You can read fucking minds now? Quick, tell me what start-up Samsung's board is debating on buying next.

Unless you actually can't do that, in which case I call bullshit with a hearty dose of go fuck yourself.

Yes, most people's fighter fixes suck. That's because most peoples homebrew classes suck, in general. Not exactly limited to fighters.

'Realism' isn't what we actually get, its idiots who can't design a way to play rock-paper-scissors given the actual rules of the game.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Snark all you want, the actual actions and creative content of people who claim to want to fix high-level mundanes while not being constrained by grognardian visions of realism continually contradict what they say.

If muggle-revisions failed in weird or divergent ways such as making them reliant on stat-replacement or getting bonuses to the Time and Scale Progression charts so large that they made the game unplayable that'd be one thing. People who try to fix the druid or wizard or psion or whatever keep coming up with all sorts of crazy shit. But when it comes to sword-based characters, people keep fucking up the revisions in largely the same way.

At this point, what possible explanation could you have for this phenomenon other than the fanbase at large has a 'realism' mental block?

[vagrant]

I dunno, because I don't read shitty homebrews? I do read good ones - thus my confusion when people on the fucking Den bitch about fighters when the Tome Fighter exists and is a thing and doesn't suck hairy horse cock.

[NineInchNall]

And honestly, outside of grognards and the Den, I have found fuck all people who think that 'Dude who stabs shit until its dead' needs to be the same concept as 'Dude who stabs shit in a totally realistic manner and has no superpowers whatsoever but he can totally still kill imaginary monsters.'

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

Um ... Then you haven't been reading much. The reason some denners have a bee in their bonnets about this shit is it crops up all the time, usually insidiously implicit.

Like when you get this sort of exchange.

Powerful sword-and-board feats would have correspondingly powerful effects, and some of them might allow the fighter to do seemingly impossible things (after all, this is D&D). I can't think of any good examples at the moment, but you get the idea.

Cut through dimensions with his blade (gate)? Block targeted spells (spell turning)? Reflect light off of shield and blade together, separating the colors into distinct layers that hamper enemies progress (prismatic wall)?

Those are all really cool effects, but not ones I would think to give straight fighter characters. Classes like warblades and swordsages already fill the roll (pretty well, actually) of sword-based magic. With a bit of a boost to one-handed single weapon fighting, such classes can already do some of the more epic things one could imagine sword wielders doing. Mostly, I would like to try to find a way to make martial-only classes seem somewhat viable compared to spellcasting classes, so that the things that they can do, while very different in flavor and mechanics, are similarly useful and powerful (if not IN the same ballpark, at least within driving distance of said ballpark. At the moment, it's more like magic use is it's own ballpark, and melee users are in a different era of time, on a different continent, on a different planet, on a different plane, where baseball has not yet been invented and never will be. Or something).

This means probably no gate or prismatic wall effects for such characters. Spell turning might work, with magic equipment and the right special abilities (from feats or magical item specials), but mostly, I think such characters should stick to the realm of the physical world, and do incredible, seemingly impossible things that don't mimic high level spell effects.

Note that the only way this poster things the fighter can do useful stuff is for an item to do things for him.

Every time someone says they don't want to play a Bo9S class because it's too magical - that's exactly the mundane melee fighter phenomenon. It's the inability to treat high-level stuff as Charles Atlas superpowers. And if you haven't encountered that, then either you haven't been reading, you've been selectively reading, or you're lying.

[vagrant]

I'll be honest, I don't read other RPG forums (except for the Den) because they drive me to homicidal rages and I don't need another reason to break my parole. (Just kidding, I broke parole years ago.) My experiences are from actual people who play the actual game in the actual world. Limited, maybe not a statistically significant sample, but my priors don't start with 'What do people on the interwebz think', but 'What do actual people I can actually see and converse with think'?

What I've found is that most people don't realise there is a problem - and once confronted with it come rather quickly to the solution of 'Give Fighters superpowers like every-fucking-body else.'

[Lago PARANOIA]

I dunno, because I don't read shitty homebrews?

While the idea of Pathfinder and 4E D&D (and 5E D&D, probably) being on the level of shitty homebrews is amusing, you can't just handwave away the results of their work.

The leaders of the industry have heard your complaints about the shitty sword-based characters and have deigned to implement a fix. And what we got is more of the same, just gussied up with superficial fixes. What's more, the Pathfinder and 4E D&D fanboys don't have a problem with this.

[vagrant]

4e thought people play mostly at low to mid levels (true), and found class balance difficult to achieve (true) so made the game low to mid-level FOREVER and solved class balance by making everything identical. Honestly, it was a rather clever fix, if utterly retarded.

PF is so deep in the Nile I keep turning on the news to hear about SKR drowning at a con, choked to death by the combined minglings of fanboy drool.

They are not, as a whole, strictly 'fighter fixes' - they all suck for many, many more reasons. But that doesn't explain why you, and/or Mistborn, have such a hate-on for conflating mundane and melee when they are quite clearly two separate concepts that have an orthogonal relationship to one another. While Mistborn is a twat, Lago, you actually sometimes show a spark of what I daringly call 'intelligence' and should have the presence of mind to distinguish the two.

[PhoneLobster]

The leaders of the industry have heard your complaints about the [Everything] and have deigned to implement a fix. And what we got is more of the same, just gussied up with superficial fixes. What's more, the Pathfinder and 4E D&D fanboys don't have a problem with this.

There fixed that for you.

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

Got it.

Nice.

[Lago PARANOIA]

They are not, as a whole, strictly 'fighter fixes'

So we're just going to No True Scotsman away the results of actual big-name developers?

When tasked with providing fighter-fixes, their thought patterns were mired in the typical nonproductive paradigms that have sunk countless other homebrews: if they just added an extra ability slot here and increased the base number there and eliminated a problematic ability here or there, the fighter would suddenly be good again.

After implementing the same shitty fixes we've seen a thousand times before, the developers and fanboys cheered and started pushing the talking points that the Fighter was 'fixed' in Pathfinder/4E D&D. And when queried on the nature of these fixes, we get much of the same 'fighters have more feats' or 'fighters get minor powers stapled onto them'.

Like it or not, developers and the fanbases at large honestly do think that a fighter fix would look pretty similar to one of the interminable shitty homebrews we've seen buried on any D&D board that don't understand why the fighter is such a fuck-up. Because that's what they fucking brag about.

[Kaelik]

but my priors don't start with 'What do people on the interwebz think', but 'What do actual people I can actually see and converse with think'?

You are an idiot. People on the internet exist. You can converse with them. Hell, if seeing someone's face was actually somehow relevant, you can skype them. You are a fucking idiot for discounting thousands of people because you would prefer to not have any real information.

my confusion when people on the fucking Den bitch about fighters when the Tome Fighter exists and is a thing and doesn't suck hairy horse cock.

Some people have standards slightly higher than "thing that doesn't suck hairy horse cock, but does such shaved horse cock" which is what the Tome Fighter is.


DISCLAIMER: Nothing said above should be construed as stating or implying the belief of the poster that Mistborn is not completely retarded or that this thread, or any other fighters suck threads created by Mistborn, has any reason to exist.

[deaddmwalking]

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

While I agree with the sentiment, the issues with the fighter aren't easily overcome. People THINK they are okay with Fighters having 'super-powers' but as soon as someone suggests one, they balk.

In 3.x, a Fighter can hit with his sword for 1d8+10 damage if he's doing things 'okay'. And people think that with multiple attacks, he's rocking. But he isn't. He can only use multiple attacks if he stands still, and he can only hit reliably on the first one or two...

Meanwhile, a Wizard could be laying down 10d6 damage to all enemies in the area (fireball) or better yet, stepping outside the hit point domain and just dropping Save-or-Die effects - where an opponent with full hit points can be just as dead as one with just 1 left...

If Fighters are expected to be 'capable' they should be able to impart status conditions like 'blind' or 'dead'. But as soon as you say 'let Fighters have a death attack' someone says 'I can see that for the Rogue (or monk), but Fighters FIGHT things - I think they should do more hit point damage than other classes' and they follow that with something that doesn't address any of the issues at all.

But don't let this particular thread make you hate-filled. This is Lord Mistborn's favorite discussion, so this is for his entertainment, only.

And since I've been drawn in to posting in this thread, I'd like to point out that the Fighter has no mechanical abilities that allow him to Fuck anyone, least of all, himself.

[Mistborn]

They are not, as a whole, strictly 'fighter fixes' - they all suck for many, many more reasons. But that doesn't explain why you, and/or Mistborn, have such a hate-on for conflating mundane and melee when they are quite clearly two separate concepts that have an orthogonal relationship to one another. While Mistborn is a twat, Lago, you actually sometimes show a spark of what I daringly call 'intelligence' and should have the presence of mind to distinguish the two.

Because the mundane melee fighter has a specific level of resonance with the playerbase. No other concept has this inherent problem no one cares if Rogues get magic later in life, seriously 2e gave the Epic Level Thief actually fucking spells. No one is going to raise a peep if the 15th level archer shoots arrows that turn into swarms of bees. But if you give the DMF any real abilities they need to compete at high levels the Conan-fellatio brigade will flip their shit because sucking is an essential part of their identity.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing said above should be construed as stating or implying the belief of the poster that Mistborn is not completely retarded or that this thread, or any other fighters suck threads created by Mistborn, has any reason to exist.

I love you too Sempai

[vagrant]

But that's not a problem with 'mundane fighter' or 'melee fighter' or even 'mundane melee fighter', its a problem with the perception that fighters need to cling to real world realism. A perception I disagree with, mind - I feel the reason people make shitty fighter fixes is A) continuity, they want their fighter to look like the 3e fighter since that's the template, and B) People are not typically good at conceptualising high-level encounters or even what possible hell an optimised mid-level wizard is capable of. They don't think to gate infinite genies for infinite wishes by being CG and using a candle of invocation, they think of Gandalf blasting shit with fireballs.

However, you fuckers continuously state that you want mundane melee fighters to die, which is retarded because people like playing mundane (using whatever BS version of mundane you wanna use to explain superpowers, because YOU CAN MAKE SHIT UP) melee fighters. I /like/ playing mundane melee fighters. And lo and behold, there is a non-stupid version of such a concept, the Tome Fighter! So which is it you have a problem with?

[darkmaster]

in high fantasy martial arts should=super powers. End of story. There is no reason not to.

I do agree, though getting into Charles Atlas Superpowers, still has the previous problem that's been stated. That, their powersource still limits the non-rules functions they could make up and get away with. However, I do think that topic should be revisited into discussion.

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

[RadiantPhoenix]

But that's not a problem with 'mundane fighter' or 'melee fighter' or even 'mundane melee fighter', its a problem with the perception that fighters need to cling to real world realism.

The underlined terms are very related.

You can make a level appropriate character who fights in melee, but:

• It needs to have the ability to get to melee reliably
• It needs to be able to do things out of combat too

The class name "fighter" doesn't give you any hint of how the character is supposed to do those things.

[Mistborn]

Yeah it's easy to say "it's just magic" but saying that physical non phlebitonium super powers can't be written to be just as viable is just laziness talking.

You're dead wrong there fuckass. Charles Atlas superpowers will always be less viable than real abilities. Because you're players are human, their is a limit to what they can imagine doing with "a well trained human body" that is infinitely less than what they imagine accomplishing with "bulshit glowing energy".

[darkmaster]

No fuck you mistborn. Yeah it's hard, doing things is hard. Especially when you have to imagine things. But if a guy develops the power to destroy things on a molecular level by punching it a million times in one second that is a) not any kind of plutonium and b) applicable any number of situations. If you can move so fast that you essentially can teleport then you can teleport anywhere on the ground. If you can jump the entire distance of a metropolitan area then you can essentially fly (which is what superman did back in the day). There is no reason Charles atlas super powers shouldn't be able to break the laws of physics except that you won't let them. Which is dumb and people can and should be discouraged from that view point which starts with writing said powers in such a way that discourages it.

[Foxwarrior]

If the guy is functionally teleporting simply by running really fast, shouldn't it look like http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ ?

[Mistborn]

But if a guy develops the power to destroy things on a molecular level by punching it a million times in one second that is a) not any kind of plutonium and b) applicable any number of situations.

That's not only a stupid argument, it's a stupid argument that was refuted in a previous thread. No you can't say my character dose blantanly impossible things just because. That's leveling up to Baron Munchausen and you're not allowed to do that in a cooperative storytelling game, because it fucks with people suspension of disbelief for no reason.

Frank Trollman[/url]]Any "advance" of anyone to Munchhausen is a disservice to everyone's concept. Because Munchhausen is a character who exists in a world without rules of cause and effect. In Munchhausen, you can pull yourself out of quicksand by reaching down and yanking upwards on your own boots. Not because you in particular are magic or have telekinesis or something, but simply because in the entire Munchhausen milieu the laws of motion do not apply to anything.

You can't go up in level and become Munchhausen for the same reason you can't go up in level and become Daffy Duck. It's not that Daffy Duck isn't "more powerful", it's that Daffy Duck is a fucking cartoon character and his mere existence means that the story being told is reduced to absurdity. Munchhausen cannot exist simultaneously with cause and effect for fuck's sake! If Munchhausen steps into the picture, everyone's character concept is out the window, because literally nothing you do or have ever done matters anymore. You have explicitly written causality out of the picture and turned absolutely everything that was, is, or could be into absurdist farce.

I like games of Munchhausen. But there is no conceivable place for any of the characters or actions from that game in a game of D&D. None.