D&DNext: Playtest Review

[Orion]

I generally have my group level up when they either find or do something that ought to power one or more of them up, or accomplish a major story goal. I tell players explicitly in advance what the default "level-up" condition is for what I'm anticipating will be the "main sotryline," but tell them if they go do something unrelated I'll invent additional level-up opportunities, and if they want to handle the situation a different way, they can propose alternative win conditions.

I like doing it this way because it makes it easier to prepare level-appropriate material in advance. I like being able to write up a multiple session pseudo-sandbox storyline, with a boss monster and final dungeons intended for 5th level characters, and knowing they'll be 5th level when they get to that fight because they can't level otherwise. They can go do more or fewer extra things before storming the overlord's fort to improve their odds of success with new equipment and allies, but they can't level grind the story out of level-appropriateness.

When I do tell the players to level up, I generally assume a substantial amount of in-game downtime, and I usually give out 2 levels at once. This ensures that spellcasters get a new spell level, fighters get a new feat, and nobody has an "empty level" where no saves or attacks increase. Also, this lets me get to high levels while still going a long time between level-ups, cutting down on the massive bureaucratic burdens.

[Username17]

The basic revelations of the Rule of Three column was that they had come up with an idea of what levels they wanted to put major breakpoints in game complexity and character power at, and they scrapped it midway through writing it up because it turns out that was stupid and didn't work. But they'll probably still enforce a couple levels of having no abilities on the fighting man because seriously fuck that guy. Not much to see there, it's the same one step forward, two steps back design failure paradigm we've seen through the entire process. They don't have a vision and won't do any math, so they never make any substantive progress.

Honestly, I think the actual takehome of the article is that they are having the bad news delivered by Rodney Thompson and putting his little picture next to it. Now, you'd think that having been the guy in charge of Star Wars SAGA edition would be the kiss of death for your career, but right now he seems to be moving up the ranks. I assume that there will be a fight between Thompson and Mearls when D&DN inevitably goes down in flames. Loser gets fired in the first round of Christmas layoffs, and the winner gets to announce D&DNext Essential Revised Edition.5 or whatever the fuck they call it.

-Username17

[Cyberzombie]

But they'll probably still enforce a couple levels of having no abilities on the fighting man because seriously fuck that guy.

I actually expect the fighting man to be reasonably okay in D&DN based on what I've seen thus far. Unless the final version includes supercharging the wizard, the fighter types are actually pretty good in D&DN. They've got advantage on all saves, a bunch of (very good) feats, ways to get extra actions and a bunch of attacks at full BAB without needing a lame full attack. To make things even better for them, the monsters have abysmal ACs.

All in all, the fighter isn't very interesting but he's at least good at what he does. This is likely because the fanbase for D&DN right now is made up of AD&D and 4Eers, both who are fine with a strong fighter. Fuck the fighter is the warcry of the 3E/PF fans and there just aren't a lot of them on the WotC boards right now.

Now it's possible they decide last minute to change gears and fuck over the fighter, but it's quite possible we may see a decent set of warrior classes in D&DN, as mostly they've focused on making the wizard weak. The direct damage is very crippled at anything but mid/high levels.

[Kaelik]

This is likely because the fanbase for D&DN right now is made up of AD&D and 4Eers, both who are fine with a strong fighter. Fuck the fighter is the warcry of the 3E/PF fans and there just aren't a lot of them on the WotC boards right now.

You are confused. Fighters are not strong in 4e or 2e. In 2e they are still buttboys of real characters, and in 4e everyone is playing the shitty attack for X damage game because characters aren't allowed to do actually cool things.

[DSMatticus]

It took years and years and years of internet argument to convince people that 3e fighters were ass. The only reason "caster edition" went memetic at all was because 4e wanted to trash the 3e fanbase as a weird form of "we're elitist and so can you" advertising, hoping that snobbery could make up for a decisive lack of substance. How much of that you want to pin on the actual 4e team and how much you want to pin on a defensive and butthurt fanbase is up to you, but that is the work it took to make "fighters suck" a widespread opinion - most of a decade's worth of balance/char op arguments and official acknowledgement by the successors of the D&D brand.

That did not really happen for 2e, because by the time arguing on the internet about TTRPG's was a thing (insofar as it can be called a thing even now), everyone was playing 3e. Now, it is the case that 3e introduced hitpoint bloat which made it significantly harder for higher level fighters to kill things through hitpoint damage, which is something they could previously do when the thing they were fighting was big, dumb, and ugly. And the traditional 2e adventure was a romp through a tight, enclosed space full of big, dumb, and ugly things; a situation designed to make the fighter feel bigger in the pants than he actually was.

2e's balance was also all about power now for power later (or vice versa) and luck of the draw.

Roll the stat reqs to be something awesome? Congratulations, you are winrar until some Gygaxian fuck you wanders across your path!

Want to be a wizard of some sort? This is level 1 - 95% of your actions will be of the not wizarding variety, but you still win the game at level 5. Enjoy your spotlight while it lasts, fighters and thieves! Here's hoping the cleric doesn't shave it short with the awesome spells he gets at level 3.

Want to be an awesome race? Enjoy being straight up better than everyone until the racial level limit, and then being straight up worse. Oh, your group doesn't use racial level limits because they're stupid? Aren't you lucky!

Also if you think our rules are imbalanced and assy, they're optional. Please buy more books in a fruitless quest to find different optional rules that aren't as imbalanced and assy.

Edit: So what I'm saying is no, AD&Ders are not comfortable with a strong fighter. They are very explicitly determined not to give the fighter any of them there weeaboo fightan magicks and make sure he stays dude with pointy sword next to clerics and wizards, whose spell lists include wildly over the top bullshit that let them complete adventures the fighter can't even go on without DM fiat. They are under the mistaken impression that this is balanced, because criticizing 2e for being caster edition never went viral. But it's still just another fucking caster edition.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is likely because the fanbase for D&DN right now is made up of AD&D and 4Eers, both who are fine with a strong fighter.

There's a difference between being okay with a strong fighter and being okay with fighter being one of the best classes. Because 'strong' is such an ambiguous word.

[Cyberzombie]

Edit: So what I'm saying is no, AD&Ders are not comfortable with a strong fighter. They are very explicitly determined not to give the fighter any of them there weeaboo fightan magicks and make sure he stays dude with pointy sword next to clerics and wizards, whose spell lists include wildly over the top bullshit that let them complete adventures the fighter can't even go on without DM fiat. They are under the mistaken impression that this is balanced, because criticizing 2e for being caster edition never went viral. But it's still just another fucking caster edition.

AD&Ders are upset with a complicated fighter. They want fighters to take their 1-3 attacks per round every round and not try anything original. So when the 4Eers want fighters to have any kind of encounter powers or special strikes, they get upset. They also don't like mechanics which challenge their preconceived sacred cows, so they hate things like damage on a miss. But make the game feel like AD&D and they're fine.

And in AD&D feel, fighters felt fine. Yeah, I'm sure that under no-holds-barred powergaming, the wizard wins out. But this is AD&D we're talking about and this is before the age of free access magic. Magic items and even the wizards spell acquisition were strictly in the hands of the DM. Gaining levels was super slow, so you'd probably never see beyond level 9 (and even that was very high for the average group).

Also you had true garbage classes like the rogue and the low level heal-tent cleric that made the weapon spec fighter look very good. Manage to get into percentile strength or beyond, and you felt like a total badass in AD&D. That's just the way it was.

[Username17]

While very low level fighters could effectively kill things in 2nd edition AD&D, the fact remains that they had an expiration date. The Druid was entitled to Treants as followers upon hitting 7th level. Really. Go ahead and fucking read what call woodland being actually does. Druids mysteriously get to 7th level at 35,000 XP. Fighters get to 6th level at 32,000 XP and get to 7th level at 64,000 XP. But they are completely obsolete at that point. The two completely expendable and replaceable animated trees that answer to the Druid's Treant lieutenant are individually more badass than any Fighter you might actually play at that level.

You can make a pretty convincing case that Druids are a stupid class and actually one of the weakest casters in the 2nd edition AD&D Player's Handbook. But they invalidated the Fighter before the Fighter got his second attack on line. And the other casters were better than that.

But it's not just about the raw numbers. It's that Fighters in 2nd Edition AD&D were dumb melee brutes who basically didn't fucking matter. They didn't get any abilities and if they did manage to go on a planar adventure (which required DM pity because they couldn't get there themselves), their magic swords stopped working. Because go fuck yourself. It's the same song and dance of 3rd edition: you can't get to the high level adventures because you don't have any abilities, and even if you could get there you can't actually win because you don't have any abilities. And if the real characters needed your singular talent to stand in an area and get attacked by monsters, they actually long ago gained the ability to summon meat shields that were better at that than you.

That being said, the life of a Fighter in 2nd edition wasn't all bad, at least compared to what came later. Indeed, hitting things with a stick was more relevant for more levels and you got a genuine ability at 9th level to have a couple dozen loyal dudes with crossbows - and that could actually accomplish some things. But people who claim that 2nd edition Fighters were "balanced" or even "not insultingly terrible" are mouth breathers. It's simply not true that Fighters were remotely balanced. It's just that as DSM pointed out: there was never an internet consensus that 2nd edition Fighters weren't balanced. They weren't balanced, but people refused to actually believe that.

When I made the Cleric Archer in early 2001 as a demonstration of how a caster could simply choose to outfight a Fighter and still solve problems, travel the multiverse, see the future, and summon angels - there was a lot of pushback. I made a mathematical proof that Fighters sucked ass, and people refused to believe they weren't balance. We hammered on this idea for years, and the thing that finally broke the memetic threshold was "CoDzilla," which got an Urban Dictionary entry in two thousand and eight. WotC literally canceled 3rd edition and then canceled 3.5 before the majority of D&D players accepted that Fighters weren't balanced with Clerics.

2nd edition Fighters were slightly better off in a couple of important ways, but they were fundamentally just as much of an NPC class in 2nd edition as they were in 3rd. It's just that this reality never penetrated the consensus.

-Username17

[tussock]

It really depends on how your group played.

2nd edition with the Complete Fighters Handbook (or later with Skills & Powers / Combat & Tactics) makes Fighters into things which are much better than a pair of Treants when the Druid has them.

Like dual-longsword for 3 attacks at 7th level (2.5 attacks at 1st), doing one-hit kills on a bunch of monsters that show up in the modules and random charts all the time. Gnolls have 9 hit points and you do around 1d12+6 at 1st level, Ogres have 19 hit points. IIRC, you end up doing five or more attacks with d20+20 damage and very few monsters can take two hits. Oh, and you hit them on a 2+ with every attack, and they do not hit you back very much, and their damage is shit in almost all cases.

3.0 leaves fighters doing weaker attack sets against much better monsters, and DMs use fewer and bigger hitters because the monsters and initiative system are all more complicated. But a few buff spells dumped on the non-magic crew and a touch of action denial on the monsters and they worked very well against things like Giants and Outsiders and Constructs and Undead and Beasts and Oozes because taking hit points away still ends the fights.

Now, the Cleric who self-buffs in 3.0 could be better at some things than that (and there's the Ranged Touch Harm and Hasted Magic Missile issue for Dragons), so WotC nerfed all the buff spells and made a lot of the monsters tougher, and nerfed all the things they'd done to help Fighters in the early splats, which made the 3.5 Fighters basically incapable of doing anything at all past about 12th level, and didn't really hurt Clerics at all.

Giving Outsiders a bunch more Hit Dice increased all their DCs and stuff, and the 3.0 save boosts like all-day +8 Wis just went away. Bad stuff for Fighters.

But you know what, that's 2004 and high levels before anyone really can notice that Fighters can't be made to work any more. And not everyone actually shifted to 3.5 or noticed every little change when they did (the sales on 3.5 aren't that good). Sure, Monks clearly needed help in 2000, no one progressed their Ranger, Paladin, or Barbarian class past level 1 or 2 because they got nothing more you cared to get (no one plays Ranger or Paladin at all in 3.5, great change). Bards clearly not good.

But you drop Brambles on a 3.0 dual-stick Fighter who's a massively buffed Hill Giant or Troll (because why not, 3.0 polymorph and all), you are doing crazy big damage against monsters that often have shitty hit points, and taking some level drain or con damage is the Fighter's fucking job so the Cleric can hang back and recover things later. It does basically work up until the action denial starts ending fights all on it's own, or the casters just wise up and stop fighting things.

And it really is very hard to cheese out as well as you could in AD&D 2nd edition, with the splats. Grand Master dual-longsword and Specialist dart-thrower, motherfucker, the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual cannot handle it.

[Dogbert]

Actually, AD&D wizards still got their two additional spells -selected by the player- every additional level. Just saying.

[Dean]

I actually don't believe that there is even an informed consensus to this day about fighters being underpowered. Like any meme people will repeat the words but they have no understanding of them. If you ask anyone in a local RPG store "Are Fighters underpowered in D&D" they will say yes but they have no basis for holding that opinion. They are just repeating things that other people have repeated to them. I have many times had people tell me that fighters were underpowered but that their local DM had solved that by giving fighters some meaningless buff to AC or damage output.

Being able to identify anything as overpowered or underpowered requires overcoming the mindset that the Oberoni fallacy is a solution for everything and learning that the rules themselves actually matter. This is something that neither the 2E crowd or the entire 5E designer stable has any understanding of. Monte Cook always seemed to be the only designer they had that hadn't swallowed all the Gygaxian apologetic bullshit hook, line, and sinker

[Juton]

I think the average gamer at the average game store never truly experiences CoDzilla or a real Wizard. Or any truly optimized character. That why people still think a monk or a fighter is still a valid choice, because their buddy's fireball Sorcerer or healstick Cleric doesn't make them feel underpowered in the least.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think the average gamer at the average game store never truly experiences CoDzilla or a real Wizard. Or any truly optimized character.

Well, I've played clerics and cleric archers in games and I can tell you a couple of things that helps with the non-realization.

1.) Clerics don't start to get really better than Fighters until about level 7 and probably at level 9. There are some neat tricks that you can do with a Cleric before then (Cleric with the Trickery and Travel domains playing in a Da Vane stats game overperforms even at level 1) but they don't outperform a fighter in their core competency until around that time.

2.) As long as a cleric doesn't outperform a fighter in every area people will still cling to their delusions of the fighter being better. A cleric archer can have access to defense in depth along with high AC and better saves, extra board tokens, a suite of save-or-dies, and higher range than a melee fighter but as long as a melee fighter's spike damage is higher it's not going to click.

You can see this sort of thinking when you compare the monk to a fighter. Monk players for years (and I was one of them) kept scrounging the list for every possible advantage and clinging to them until it was demonstrated that all of the advantages of monks (d20 fist, spell resistance, SUPER SPRING ATTACK, flurry of blows, great saves, etc.) were either trivially obviated by fighter advantages or didn't amount to a hill of beans. For me, the clinching evidence was the list of monsters a monk couldn't hurt with their unarmed strike at various CR and the realization that monks couldn't even hurt most epic monsters with their fists until around level 24 -- spending both of their bonus feats just to get past the damage reduction.

[Dean]

Somewhat famously the clincher for you was your Monk being beaten in an unarmed fist fight by a Paladin. Which just further demonstrates your point I think. You only accepted being worse when your class, at it's own specialty, was outshined by another class who had invested no resources to compete in that realm.

This phenomenon shows why people think things like Synthesist Summoners and Melee Clerics are "bad form" and ban worthy even though they are powered down versions of their normal classes.

[OgreBattle]

Lago, you had a Monk beaten unconscious and violated by a Cleric, right?

Most games are between levle 1-8 anyways, with DM's running 9-15 as "1 to 8 with bigger numbers"

As for the 2e fighter, they murder things with weapon specialization in bows or darts, you play them like a Gauntlet character.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yes, my monk character was knocked unconscious and peed on in front of the girl he was trying to impress. Of course, I made it much worse by building my character retardedly -- I had an 8 in Constitution and my feats were Power Attack and Cleave until I retrained them to the Spring Attack Line for level 3. But my defeat was pretty much inexorable.

Though, that wasn't the moment in which I realized what was going on behind the scenes with the math. That was just the moment of real doubt, like when a Christian hears really unconvincing evidence as to why the Book of Job or Judges. The real realization came with Why Monks? and then later reading about the Cleric Archer and Elemental Druid threads. And even then I still tried to make my character work with a fundamentally broken concept, which is why I liked the Shaman and Oriental Adventures so much.

[OgreBattle]

Yes, my monk character was knocked unconscious and peed on in front of the girl he was trying to impress.

Have you watched Kungfu Hustle? Because that exact scene is in the movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3YbxgXq6dU

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have. The scene happened in 2001, though, so he either took it from Fist of the North Star, The Shield, or just came up with it himself.

[sake]

Have you watched Kungfu Hustle? Because that exact scene is in the movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3YbxgXq6dU

But it all turns out okay at the end of the movie when the DM shows him some pity after getting his ass kicked and has a couple of npcs preform a magic ritual that changes all his Monk levels over to unarmed Cleric.

[shadzar]

Edit: So what I'm saying is no, AD&Ders are not comfortable with a strong fighter. They are very explicitly determined not to give the fighter any of them there weeaboo fightan magicks and make sure he stays dude with pointy sword next to clerics and wizards, whose spell lists include wildly over the top bullshit that let them complete adventures the fighter can't even go on without DM fiat. They are under the mistaken impression that this is balanced, because criticizing 2e for being caster edition never went viral. But it's still just another fucking caster edition.

AD&Ders are upset with a complicated fighter. They want fighters to take their 1-3 attacks per round every round and not try anything original.

um no. AD&Ders don't like complex fighters because if they wanted lots of lists of shit to deal with they would be playing wizards. the fighter can do fancy shit with called-shots, just like anyone else. they just don't have to fuck with all the other shit and think about it while playing a fighter. it lets you wind down while playing rather than having to think about ever corner thing of the game like thief and its skill lists, wizard or clerics and their spell lists, etc.

they do not want some codified lsit telling them what thigns they can come up with, and if it is NOT on that lsit, then they canot do it because some rules-laywer starts screaming RAW! its not in the rules, you can't do that! because new-age players are so stupid they think the rules provide everything to play the game. which makes them morons because D&D can never be all inclusive.

and that 4th edition passive perception rollplaying is back in DDN as of the newest L&L article.

[Cyberzombie]

The fighter is just never going to compete as a utility character. High level wizards can transmute objects, and travel to other planes and other things fighters never will. But that's not a huge problem because fighter PCs don't really want or expect that.

All you have to do to appease fighter PCs is make them good at stabbing stuff and soaking attacks in combat. While a wizard would usually beat a fighter 1v1 in an AD&D duel, that's not important because fighters could still chew up the monsters that you were fighting at that level.

But the 3E/PF developers hate fighters and the system shows. People often try to tell you that fighters are linear and wizards are quadratic. That is a total lie. Fighters are worse than linear. In a linear world, the two weapon fighting feat would be as good as the greater two weapon fighting feat and the extra attack you acquire at level 16 would be as good as the extra attack you get at level 6. But none of these are true. The fighter gets worse and worse as he levels. Think about it. You start out with a single powerful attack you can throw out as a standard action, and it's actually competitive. Then at level 6, you're forced to use full attacks to get your full complement of attacks and your secondary attack isn't nearly as accurate as the original one you started the game with. And it just goes downhill from there. Of course, Spellcasters casting times stay at 1 action even for high level spells, and they even gain the ability to quicken lower level spells for two spells a round. Monsters get liberal application of abilities like pounce, as well as natural attacks that never have more than a -5 penalty.

The fact that this fundamental flaw hasn't been fixed in 3.5 or Pathfinder tells me that the people who work on those games hate fighters. In fact Pathfinder nerfed feats and made it even harder for fighters to pick up abilities like pounce to further stick them in their place as an NPC class.

[nockermensch]

Somebody please update the meme to read "Exponential Wizards and Logarithmic Fighters".

[malak]

The fact that this fundamental flaw hasn't been fixed in 3.5 or Pathfinder tells me that the people who work on those games hate fighters. In fact Pathfinder nerfed feats and made it even harder for fighters to pick up abilities like pounce to further stick them in their place as an NPC class.

I don't think they hate fighters, much more likely this is simply a case of Hanlon's Razor.

[virgil]

The fact that this fundamental flaw hasn't been fixed in 3.5 or Pathfinder tells me that the people who work on those games hate fighters. In fact Pathfinder nerfed feats and made it even harder for fighters to pick up abilities like pounce to further stick them in their place as an NPC class.

I don't think they hate fighters, much more likely this is simply a case of Hanlon's Razor.

Whether it's active malice or ineptitude, you need to ask if you can make predictions under both models and how their accuracy compares. Their actual motivation matters little if the end result is the same.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Somebody please update the meme to read "Exponential Wizards and Logarithmic Fighters".

And make sure to mention that the game mathematically assumes exponential characters.

(Opposed level checks are an exponential progression: X is to Y as X+Z is to Y+Z)