4E: Why are people so hung up over the Dumbass Melee Fighter

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 2:18 am

Ice9 wrote: Actually, I think DMF-advocates were only part of the problem. The other part - maybe the bigger part - was people who thought that a castle with stone walls, spiked pits, and DMF guards should be a valid challenge for a 20th level party ... and then bitched and moaned when it wasn't.

There might be a grain of truth to this statement.

However, the reason why I am so hard on the DMF and not on these people ultimately stems from the fact that the former's deleterious input to the game is intentional; the latter, sadly, is probably just them Not Realizing that stone walls and whatever don't constitute a challenge anymore.

And I know that my statement isn't really different from what you're saying, but I also think that this next thing I'm going to super-paste is key.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:
There are plenty of people who would enjoy playing Aragorn or Conan even though they can't take on armies of orcs singlehandedly.

4E isn't advertised as that kind of game, though.

Here's what the game actually says in the PHB, page 7.

A Fantastic World
The world of the DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game is a place of magic and monsters, of brave warriors and spectacular adventures. It begins with a basis of medieval fantasy and then adds the creatures, places, and powers that make the D&D world unique.

Or how about on pages 28 and 29?

In the paragon tier, your character is a shining example of heroism, set well apart from the masses. Your class still largely determines your capabilities. In addition, you gain extra abilities in your speciality: your paragon path.
...
You are able to travel more quickly from place to place, perhaps on a hippogriff mount or using a spell to grant your party flight. In combat, you might fly or even teleport short distances. Death becomes a a surmountable obstacle and the fate of a nation or even the world might hang in the balance as you undertake momentous quests. You navigate uncharted regions and explore long-forgotten dungeons, where you can expect to fight sneaky drow, savage giants, ferocious hydras, fearless golems, rampaging barbarian hordes, bloodthirsty vampires, and crafty mind flayers.

In the epic tier, your character's capabilities are truly superheroic. Your class still determines most of your abilities, but your most dramatic powers come from your choice of epic destiny (Ed Note: THIS IS A DAMNABLE LIE), which you select at 21st level. You travel across nations in the blink of an eye and your whole party might take to the air in combat. The success or failure of your adventures has far-reaching consequences, possibly determining the fate of millions in this world and even planes beyond. You navigate otherworldly realms and explore never-before-seen caverns of wonder, where you can expect to battle savage pit fiends, the ferocious tarrasque, sinister sorrowsworn deathlords, bloodthirsty lich archmages, and even demon princes.

What do we learn from this mission statement? A few things.

1) You are expected to be defined by the class you took at level 1 as you are late in life; not as much in the epic tier as you were in the heroic tier, but the fact that epic-level heroes started off as a 'fighter' or 'cleric' is still supposed to mean something.

2) The game has an enormous hard-on for flight for some reason, whining and wheedling so much about how epic-level heroes 'might fly for the duration of combat!'

3) The game has no clue what it's doing for scope of stakes. How is 'determining the fate of millions in the world' more epic than 'saving an entire nation or even the world'?

4) The game has no clue what it's doing for the scope of challenges. Why is a tarrasque more deadly than a mind-flayer? Why do I care so much about what lich archmages are doing? I know the real reason to that answer (they're stronger and take more power to defeat), but what does that mean to someone outside the Dungeons and Dragons bubble?

5) Most importantly, even though 4E Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have any clue what it's supposed to be doing, you can infer that the adventures of Conan and Aragorn are only supposed to be good for heroic tier.

This is a straight-up deceit. Or incompetence of the highest caliber. Whatever. I'm not saying that a game with a limited scope has to be bad. Shadowrun has a very limited scope and it's a good game. I am saying that the game that Dungeons and Dragons is and the game that it wants to be are two different beasts.

Saying that the Aragorn effect is intentional is just a weak-ass apology.

Upon reflecting on the dichotomy I set up, I eventually settled upon incompetence instead of deceit. Which doesn't change the outcome, but it does help tamper down on the INTESTINE-RIPPING MURDEROUS RAGE. So don't take that away from me.

K · Post by K » Tue Oct 13, 2009 2:33 am

4e is exactly the game it was playtested to be: something you played on your lunch break and didn't really care about.

Yes, all playtesting was done at lunchtime by the designers and some interns. This means it's meant to be interesting for 30-60 minutes at a time.

And yeh, it is, and as a serious RPer I'm not going to go to the trouble to get people together at someone's house for 3o-60 minutes of fun. At that point I might as well play a few rounds of Flux and skip all the set-up time.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:33 am

Ice9 wrote:Actually, I think DMF-advocates were only part of the problem. The other part - maybe the bigger part - was people who thought that a castle with stone walls, spiked pits, and DMF guards should be a valid challenge for a 20th level party ... and then bitched and moaned when it wasn't.

Some people actually didn't want to be playing high-level adventures - but instead of admitting that, they complained that everything high-level was broken and that their stone fortress with ogres should be a legitimate threat at any level. So now it is. 5 or 6 levels of play, stretched out over 30 levels - so that some dumbasses don't have to admit they only like low-level games.

The most retarded part is these people will still never see epic play, even as they bitch about how shit is broken. Because they still start at level 1 like dumbasses, and run away from Epic Tier because it's too not Stone Castley.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 4:50 am

Well, no. It wasn't so much that people didn't want to admit they liked low level only. It was more that many people never expected the game to vastly change at high level. D&D to them is LotR and the low level game, and so when the game changed it felt like, "hey we're not playing D&D anymore."

That's true, but there's really no need for things to stretch out over 30 levels if they're not changing much. Heck, if you're going to start out as LotR and end as LotR, why even have levels at all? Go skill/ability based and you save a lot of bookkeeping that doesn't even matter if you're not changing the scope.

My problem with those people is that in 3E, they could play their game, and I could play my game. All they needed to do is say "this campaign is going from 2nd to 6th level". But apparently, that was too hard, so the option to play a larger-scope game was destroyed, for the convenience of not having to set a level range.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 5:07 am

I am sympathetic to people who want to play LotR-powered characters--yes, even the DMF--for a finite amount of time. I personally think it's rad to the maximum to go from Steve the crap-covered middleaged farmer to Steve the Dark Paladin who can kill stone golems with table cutlery.

But a lot of these characters inherently have a shelf life. Some archetypes do not have a shelf life. Like wizards. I'm cool with them existing for all tiers of play. Elric easily convinces me as an epic-level badass and I also believe that Harry Potter would fit right in with the Fellowship of the Ring.

One of the things that initially excited me about 4th Edition was the building of tiers--there would be the heroic (LotR tier), the paragon (superhero tier), and the epic (super weeaboo fightan tier). I thought that this was finally going to happen and the bad old days about the wizard and the cleric having to stock up on flying potions and invisibility potions just so that the fighter could participate in a high level plot would be over, since the fighter would be forced to upgrade to Golem Knight or Legendary Wrestler or some shit.

And then we got... this.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:12 am

Are you fucking kidding me? Hermione Granger > the entire fellowship. That's without bringing up Dumbledore.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 8:27 am

Ice9 wrote:
Well, no. It wasn't so much that people didn't want to admit they liked low level only. It was more that many people never expected the game to vastly change at high level. D&D to them is LotR and the low level game, and so when the game changed it felt like, "hey we're not playing D&D anymore."
That's true, but there's really no need for things to stretch out over 30 levels if they're not changing much. Heck, if you're going to start out as LotR and end as LotR, why even have levels at all? Go skill/ability based and you save a lot of bookkeeping that doesn't even matter if you're not changing the scope.

My problem with those people is that in 3E, they could play their game, and I could play my game. All they needed to do is say "this campaign is going from 2nd to 6th level". But apparently, that was too hard, so the option to play a larger-scope game was destroyed, for the convenience of not having to set a level range.

Yeah, exactly. Before 4E, DnD always was characterized by exponential power growth and moving from people who clean overgrown rats from cellars into the realm of crazy shit rather fast. However, for some reason that is completely fucking beyond me, authors of settings and novels long refused to accept this, particularly for non-wizards. (Note, that most settings, particularly those used during 2E, quietly assume, that wizards do all the important stuff, head every important organizations, serve as BBEGs, and so on. If not wizards, then clerics.) At first, the main result were stupid novels, where characters can somehow fight, for example, an intelligent tyrannosaurus, that can shoot death beams from his maw, or a whole band of 12-feet tall giants, despite supposedly only having strength and skill of peak-level normal humans. Then it started to seep back into the game. In fact, 3.X fighter was actually caused by this dumbass tendency of downgrading sword-swingers to the level of mundane humans, in the game, where the titular beings are house-sized, fire-breathing, spell-casting, and flying (AD&D2 fighters were much more formidable, and, I must say, closer to what you usually see from badass normals in fantasy - good all-around saves, fighting ability that cannot really be replicated by other classes, non-fighting skills still are fewer, compared to wizards, but at least you aren't so restricted in what you might take). But even if we don't consider the scale of DnD threats, 3.X fighters wall short even of low-level fantasy characters. In fantasy that is not directly influenced by DnD, fighting dudes that cannot also use magic and don't have plot-device artifacts that buff them to high heavens, usually are skillmonkeys (see: Conan and other Howard characters, Fafhrd). 3.X fighter falls far short of emulating these and so it does not even have a place in a game that's supposed to reflect heroic fantasy tropes.

As about 4E, it, in my opinion, was not caused by a conscious decisions to "stay at low fantasy level". It has too much oversized swords and power glows for that. Rather, authors strived to create a tabletop CRPG, where your abilitiy to break the boundaries of plot or use non-predefined approaches is practically nonexistent and the threat level scales with you no matter what.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 8:37 am

Boolean wrote:Are you fucking kidding me? Hermione Granger > the entire fellowship. That's without bringing up Dumbledore.

Without literal plot devices OR going to the darkside, HP wizards below professor level basically are dudes with flying gadgets and guns that shoot non-lethal bullets, who also have some cool non-combat skills. Things, however, change massively, the instant you turn evil, upgrade your magic gun to lethal bullets and start throwing around Dominates left and right.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 2:14 pm

Even without going evil you can still paralyze people left, right and center and do all kinds of nasty stuff. Missing out on dominate kind of stings though. But even just Stupefy (paralyze), Accio (Summon/find item), Leviosa (levitate item, including items in someone's hand) and Alohomora (open locks) make you a useful adventurer and those are taught to 12-year-olds.

Summoning arbitrarily complex items/creatures from thin air, vanishing creatures and items, creating luck or love potions, healing injuries, reading people's minds - all of that is damn powerful and on par with killing people and certainly more useful than torturing them.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:41 pm

Good guys presumably do have powerful combat spells: how many times in the "Holy shit, people die!" half of the series do you see battles where it really is a fight to the death and everyone's slinging spells about? Best example being when whatsherface kills Sirius (spoiler) with the Avada Kadavra spell. It made me wonder "Just what the fuck were everyone else tossing about then?"

Kids can also apparently unleash the Septum Sempora, which slices you up and is not [Evil].

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 4:10 pm

Talisman wrote: You yourself brought up Batman. Good example; and do you know why? because Batman is one of the very few "superheroes" withiout actual superpowers; and despite this, he routibely beats superowered adversaries, including other superheroes gone rogue. How?

Through skill, endurance, strength, cunning, and a bit of luck.

and perhaps a bit too much love from the writers

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:23 am

I think this is why custom melee PrCs are so common in 3e.

For 4e, well... fuck it.

Lago, I think your criticisms are entirely valid and AWESOME.

The take-home is that when tiered play is promised, tiered play should be delivered. The particular concept of Heroic-Paragon-Epic is oh-so-much better than its particular execution in 4e, since in that iteration those distinctions are largely meaningless outside of when the battle music stops.

Also, it's totally okay to have a non-tiered lethal skill-based game, but to merge the two is going to end in a trainwreck.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 5:08 am

I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone how awesome I am: Dungeon Crusade has a Tier system that works nicely.

Also, Batman only gets by due to author-wank and his superpower of turning everyone around him into drooling idiots.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 6:16 am

Seriously. Superman has Superintelligence. I'm pretty sure he could figure out something like "Stay away from Kryptonite" or "Build Kryptonite Shield" or "Buy up all the Kryptonite on Earth and launch it all into space."

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:31 am

Koumei wrote:I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone how awesome I am: Dungeon Crusade has a Tier system that works nicely.

Also, Batman only gets by due to author-wank and his superpower of turning everyone around him into drooling idiots.

JLA-version Batman has a shitload of superpowers anyway, if animated incarnations are any indication. Enough super-toughness to be punched or thrown around by Darkseid (Superman-level strength) without immediately being turned into a bag of shattered bones at best. Enough super-strength and super-speed to contribute positively in fights against mooks that actually register as threats on radars of most other JLA members. Super-gadgets.